The night Franklin Roosevelt became president, the world watched him. I, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God.
” His wife stood in the crowd and watched too, wearing a ring her husband had never given her. A sapphire from a woman the world was not meant to know about. Eleanor Roosevelt was the most admired first lady in American history. She taught a nation to love. And for 30 years, she hid the greatest love of her life in 3,000 letters sealed in boxes.
waiting to be read. This is that story. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Behind the Throne. There are periods in history so vast, so weighted with fear and sacrifice that the people who lived through them are remembered not as individuals but as symbols. The 1930s and 40s were such a time. A decade of bread lines and shuttered banks.
Then a decade of war on two fronts, of gold stars in windows and telegrams that arrived in the early morning hours and changed everything. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd president of the United States, led his country through both. His voice on the radio became the voice of American hope. His face at the end of long and exhausted days was the face a nation turned to for reassurance.
And beside him for 12 years stood Eleanor. She was unlike any first lady who had come before her. She held her own press conferences, women journalists only in the years when women rarely had a seat at the table. She wrote a daily newspaper column distributed to hundreds of papers across the country.
and she never missed a single day. She traveled into the coal mines of Appalachia, sat in the kitchens of tenant farmers, and came back to Washington with their stories folded in her hands. She fought for civil rights at a time when doing so required real courage. In 1948, she helped carry the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through the United Nations, a document that still stands as the moral foundation of international law.
The world called her the greatest first lady who ever lived. When she died in November of 1962, Adli Stevenson delivered her eulogy at the United Nations and said she would rather light a candle than curse the darkness. Tributes arrived from every capital on Earth. But candles, by their nature, can only illuminate what is near them.
And there were rooms in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life that the world was never permitted to see. There were letters, more than 3,000 of them, written over 30 years, to a single woman. Letters Eleanor kept in her private drawer, letters that, by arrangement, were sealed from public view until 10 years after the death of the woman who received them.
And when those boxes were finally opened in the spring of 1978 in the quiet reading rooms of the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, the historians who sat down to read them grew very still. Tonight’s story does not begin in the White House. It does not begin in the halls of the United Nations or at any of the places where Eleanor Roosevelt made history.
It begins much earlier in a brownstone house in New York City where a small girl with large serious eyes had already learned something that would shape the rest of her life. That love was not something you could count on to stay. That is where we go first. To the beginning, to Eleanor before the world had a use for her.
The house on West 37th Street was not a warm house. It was beautiful, highse ceiling and well staffed, the kind of house that appeared in the social columns and was described in terms of its appointments rather than its inhabitants. But warmth requires more than good furniture, and warmth was not something Anna Hall Roosevelt offered easily.
Anna Hall was one of the great beauties of New York society. tall, graceful, the kind of woman who entered a room and rearranged it without meaning to. She had married Elliot Roosevelt, a nephew of the wider Roosevelt family, heir to a distinguished name, and together they had produced a daughter who was, by most accounts, a disappointment.
The daughter was Eleanor. She was not beautiful, not the way her mother was. She had a receding chin and large front teeth, and none of the easy social confidence that Anna seemed to exhale with every breath. Anna had a name for her eldest child, one she used without particular malice, and that landed each time like a small stone dropped from a height.
She called her Granny. And when she was feeling more direct, the ugly duckling. As if the comparison were obvious, as if the duckling’s eventual fate were not part of the story. Eleanor was 8 years old when her mother died of dtheria. She had not been a loving child to a loving mother. She had been a serious child in a house that preferred charm, a plain-faced daughter in a family that valued beauty, a girl who watched her mother from across the room and could not seem to find her way inside.
When Anna died in 1892, Eleanor did not cry. She noted this about herself later with the careful honesty that would become her signature. She had not yet understood what she had lost. What she had already understood, what she had perhaps always understood, was that she had never fully had it to begin with. What she had was her father.
Elliot Roosevelt was in many ways everything Anna was not. warm, impulsive, given to sweeping gestures of affection that overwhelmed his solemn daughter, and made her feel briefly like the most important person in the world. He wrote her letters from wherever he happened to be, and he was often somewhere else, somewhere he had gone in pursuit of the thing that was slowly destroying him. Elliot was an alcoholic.
By the time Eleanor was seven, he had been sent away. First to a sanatorium in Virginia, then to Paris, then back again, confined, managed, concealed by the Roosevelt family, kept at careful distance from both the family’s reputation and his own children. Eleanor wrote to him constantly.
She addressed the letters formally, “Dear Father,” and waited for his replies with the intensity of a child who has only one safe place in the world and knows it. He wrote back when he could. He made promises he could not keep. He told her that someday they would live together in a house of their own, just the two of them, and everything would be right.
On August 13th, 1894, Elliot Roosevelt died in New York City, attempting in the final stages of delirium to climb from a second floor window. He was 34 years old. Eleanor was nine. She was an orphan now. Her grandmother, Mary Livingston Hall, took her in and took her in strictly. The household at Tivoli was governed by rules that seemed designed less for children than for grief.
Early rising, proper posture, modest expectations, a general atmosphere of duty performed, and appetite suppressed. Warmth again was not on offer. Eleanor’s aunts were women who could reduce a child to silence with a single look, and they exercised this ability freely. One of them, in a deliberate act of cruelty that Eleanor would carry for decades, sat the teenager down one afternoon and told her the full story of her father’s unraveling, the affairs, the illegitimate child, the final years of disgrace, as if the truth were a punishment Eleanor had somehow earned rather than a wound that had no place being inflicted on a girl who had already lost everything. According to Joseph Lash, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning biography drew on Eleanor’s own correspondence, she was
during these years insecure and starved for affection. The ugly duckling of the family. She had been told so often enough that she had begun to believe it. She was 15 when her grandmother sent her abroad to Allenswood Academy in Wimbledon, just outside London. It was intended to be a finishing school, the kind that polished young women of good family into suitable marriage material.
What it became for Eleanor Roosevelt was something entirely different, something she had not encountered before, a place where someone looked at her and saw what was there. The head mistress was Marie Sylvestra, a formidable French woman, rigorously intellectual, with very little patience for surfaces.
She had spent her life cultivating the minds of young women, and had learned to recognize potential in the places other educators ignored. She found it immediately in Eleanor. Not in spite of Eleanor’s awkwardness, or her plain features, or the watchful guardedness she carried, but through them, as if the seriousness beneath were the only thing worth seeing.
Sylvestra took Eleanor on as a special student. She included her on European travels during school holidays, argued ideas with her across dinner tables in Florence and Paris, trusted her with opinions about politics and literature and the world. According to Eleanor’s own memoir, Sylvester once told her she was among the most intellectually promising students she had taught.
It was the first time in Eleanor Roosevelt’s memory that she had been fully seen. She changed at Allen’swood. Not overnight. Nothing in Eleanor’s life changed without cost, but steadily, the way a thing grows when it finally receives what it was always waiting for. She stood straighter. She stopped making herself small.
For 3 years, she lived in a place where her mind was treated as an asset and her seriousness as a virtue. And then in 1902, she was sent home, back to the grandmother’s house, back to the social debut at the Walddorf Histori she had not requested, to the long season of afternoon calls and dinner parties that constituted a young woman’s formal entrance into the world she had been born to. She was 18.
She had known what it felt like for 3 years at Allenswood to be enough. Now she was back in a world that would spend the next decade measuring her against standards she did not meet. It was at one of those dinner parties that she met him. A distant cousin, a young man with an easy smile and the kind of confidence that generated its own gravity, handsome, charming.
He paid attention to her in a room full of women who were lovelier and more practiced in the art of being noticed. And Eleanor, who had spent the better part of her life being told she was insufficient, let herself believe for a while that she had finally found the safe place she had been looking for since childhood. She was not wrong to want it.
She was only wrong about where she had found it. But that particular reckoning was still 13 years away. First came the wedding. First came the children and the house and the role. First came the years of Franklin Roosevelt’s rising star and the woman who stood beside it, still learning, still waiting, still carrying somewhere inside her the small, serious girl who had written letters to a father who could not always write back.
She had survived abandonment before. She would survive it again. She just did not yet know that the person who would finally answer, truly answer, was not the man she had married. It was someone she had not yet met. For a while, she believed she had made it. The years after the wedding, March of 1905, a ceremony at her cousin Theodore’s townhouse, the president himself giving the bride away.
Those years had the feeling of solid ground. Franklin was rising, Eleanor was beside him. They had six children in 10 years, filling the houses that Sarah Roosevelt chose for them, eating at tables that Sarah had furnished, raising their children in the manner Sarah approved. Eleanor learned slowly and without complaint how to perform the life that was expected of her.
She was not unhappy. She had not allowed herself a clear picture of what happiness might look like. That, too, was something she had learned young. But there was one thing she had allowed herself, one real thing underneath the performance of the beautiful wife. She had allowed herself to believe that Franklin saw her, the way Marie Sylvestra had seen her, the way her father in his better years had seen her, that somewhere in this carefully managed life she was known to the person she had chosen to build it with. It is possible she was right once. And it is possible that power changes things, that the closer Franklin Roosevelt moved toward the center of the world’s attention, the less he needed to look anywhere else. In 1913, Eleanor hired a social secretary. The young woman’s name was
Lucy Mercer, 22 years old, Catholic, from a family that had once had standing in Washington society and no longer had much of anything else. She was graceful and warm and easy in a way that Eleanor, by her own admission, had never quite managed to be. She came to the house three mornings a week to help with Eleanor’s considerable correspondence.
She stayed for 5 years. Franklin noticed her almost immediately. Eleanor found out the way betrayals are usually discovered, not through a confrontation or a confession, but through something small and ordinary that suddenly means everything. It was September of 1918. Franklin had been in Europe on naval inspection duty and had returned home gravely ill.
Pneumonia in both lungs carried from the ship on a stretcher. Eleanor managed his arrival, supervised his care, and began, as any wife would, to sort through the bags he had brought back with him. Inside one of the suitcases beneath his clothes was a packet of letters tied together. She would have recognized the handwriting.
She did not describe this moment in detail in her public writings. She was not, in those years, a woman who put her private wounds on paper for the world. What we know is drawn from the biographers who came after, from the accounts of those who knew her then, and from the quality of the silence she kept around it for the rest of her life.
According to multiple biographers, including Joseph Lash, Eleanor confronted Franklin and offered him his freedom, a divorce, clean, if not simple. Franklin’s mother heard about it before the ink was dry on the thought. Sarah Delano Roosevelt was not a woman who tolerated complication. She had spent three decades building her son’s life according to her own specifications.
The right schools, the right wife, the right trajectory, and she was not about to watch it dissolve over a secretary. Her position delivered without particular warmth was straightforward. If Franklin chose divorce, he would lose the family fortune. every dollar of it. The house at Hyde Park, the income that funded his political life, his mother’s name, and everything that came with it.
His political advisers offered a similar calculation. A divorce would end him. This was 1918, not an era in which public men recovered from such things. Franklin stayed. He ended his relationship with Lucy Mercer or gave Eleanor to understand that he had and pledged not to see her again. He chose his career.
He chose his inheritance. He remained in every visible sense a married man. Their son James, writing years later, described what the marriage became after that autumn as, in his words, an armed truce that endured until the day he died. A household still intact in every external measure, the shared name, the shared address, the shared public purpose.
But the private architecture had shifted permanently into something neither of them fully named. Eleanor reportedly said to a friend in the years that followed, “I have the memory of an elephant. I can forgive, but never forget.” Whether those were her exact words or close enough, the women who knew her understood what she meant.
She was not going to pretend. She was not going to manufacture warmth where warmth no longer lived. But she was also not going to become small again. Not the way she had been small as a child, waiting for love that arrived irregularly and then stopped. She had been abandoned before, by a mother who had found her insufficient, by a father who had loved her and left anyway.
She had learned at 9 years old in a house in Tivoli that the only reliable thing was the work she could do with her own hands and her own mind. And so she put her hands and her mind to work. She threw herself into the political life that Franklin’s ambitions required of her. Campaigning, organizing, speaking, doing the things that his worsening health would soon make impossible for him to do himself.
When polio struck in 1921, and robbed Franklin of the use of his legs, it was Eleanor who kept his name alive in the rooms where it needed to be heard. She did not do it out of love. Exactly. She did it out of something harder and more durable than love, out of a sense of purpose and a determination that the life she was living would mean something even if it could no longer mean what she had once hoped.
She was building herself deliberately, carefully, piece by piece in the years when women were not supposed to build anything that belonged only to them. She just had not yet found the one person who would see it happen, who would be there watching close enough to catch what she was constructing in the dark, and who would in time reflect it back to her in thousands of letters.
That meeting was still a decade away, but it was coming. She came from nothing. That is the first thing to understand about Lena Hickok. Not because it is the most important thing about her, but because it explains the particular quality of her attention. People who have had to fight for everything they own tend to notice more than those who were handed it.
They watch more carefully. They miss less. Lena Alice Hickok was born in 1893 in a small town in Wisconsin. The daughter of a butter maker and his wife. Her childhood was not a protected thing. Her father was a violent man and her mother, by the time Lena was 14, was dead. The girl left home alone with almost nothing and worked as a domestic servant in other people’s houses until she could find a way out.
She found it in writing, in newspapers, in the specific forgiving meritocracy of the newsroom, where what you could produce on deadline mattered more than who your family was or how your hair looked. By 1932, Lena Hickok, known to everyone simply as Hick, was the most celebrated female reporter in the country.
She had covered politics, crime, sports, and human misery with equal ferocity. She had her by line on the front page of some of the most important stories of the decade. The Associated Press trusted her with assignments that in those years were still considered a man’s province. She wore tailored suits, kept her hair short, and had long since stopped pretending to be the kind of woman she was not. She had loved women.
She did not announce it. It was simply the truth of her life, held quietly, the way she held most things that mattered. In the summer of 1932, Hick was assigned to cover Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the Democratic presidential nominee. It was not an assignment she had wanted. A candidate’s wife, she told her editors, was not a story.
Eleanor Roosevelt, as Hick understood it then, was a series of obligatory photographs and careful, unmemorable answers about the White House garden. She was wrong. What Hick found when she sat down across from Eleanor Roosevelt for the first interview was a woman unlike anyone she had encountered in a decade of watching public figures perform their public selves.
Eleanor was not performing. She spoke directly with the kind of honesty that is almost uncomfortable to witness in someone who has every reason to be guarded. She admitted her fears. She admitted her doubts. She looked at Hick the way very few people of any status look at journalists, as a full person worth telling the truth to.
Hick noticed. Over the months of the campaign, the two women found each other again and again in hotel lobbies, in motorcades, in the particular suspended intimacy of long train rides across the country at night. They talked, they argued, they recognized in each other the same essential quality, a life that had been built from damage and was still being built and had not yet finished becoming what it was going to be.
By the time Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated as president of the United States on the 4th of March, 1933, Lena Hickok had given Eleanor a ring, a sapphire set in diamonds, small enough to wear without explanation, significant enough to need one. Eleanor wore it to the inauguration. She stood in the cold Washington air and watched her husband take his oath of office before a nation halfbroken with fear and debt.
Listened to the words that would echo down through history. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And on the finger of her left hand was a ring her husband had not given her. No one in that crowd knew what it meant. No one asked. That night, the White House filled with officials and guests, and the noise of the new administration beginning its work.
Eleanor moved through it, composed, gracious, the first lady the country expected her to be. And then, when the house had finally grown quiet, she sat down at her writing desk and picked up a pen. “Hick, my dearest,” she wrote on the 5th of March, 1933. I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you.
I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you, even though I’m busy every minute. The following morning, she wrote again, “I can’t kiss you, so I kiss your picture good night and good morning.” And later that same week, looking down at the ring on her hand, “Your ring is a great comfort.
” I look at it and think, “She does love me or I wouldn’t be wearing it.” These letters are preserved at the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park. They are written in Eleanor’s own hand on White House stationary in the first days of one of the most consequential presidencies in American history. They are not the letters of a woman performing affection.
They are the letters of someone who has waited a long time to be known and has finally, in the most unlikely and impossible of circumstances, found the person who knows her. Across the city, Hick was writing back. In December of that same year, she put down on paper what she remembered most clearly about Eleanor’s face when they were apart.
Most clearly, she wrote, “I remember your eyes with a kind of teasing smile in them and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips.” Two women, one in the White House, one in a rented room. The letters, and there would be thousands of them, were only just beginning.
Hick had not walked away from the story she had been assigned to cover. She had walked into it entirely and left her career behind at the door. Within months, she resigned from the Associated Press. She could no longer report objectively on the Roosevelt administration. Her editors noted she could not argue with them.
She simply cleared her desk and moved closer. And for the next 12 years, the most watched woman in the world would live two lives. One of them in full public light, the other in ink on paper by lamplight, addressed to someone the world was not meant to know about. Consider what it meant to be Eleanor Roosevelt in the years between 1933 and 1945.
The public Eleanor was everywhere. She held press conferences, women journalists only, every week, a practice no first lady had attempted before. She launched her daily newspaper column, My Day, and wrote it without interruption, filing 700 words each morning about the country she was watching and the people she was meeting and the things she believed needed to be said.
She traveled to the coal camps of West Virginia, to the segregated military bases of the American South, to the factories where women were building the machinery of a war their husbands and sons were dying in. She brought back what she found. She made the president read it. She pushed quietly and then less quietly for a country that was actually equal, not merely described as such in its founding documents.
She was, in every visible sense, the most active and consequential first lady the republic had ever produced. The private Eleanor was different. Late at night, when the White House had settled into the particular silence of large houses with thick walls and many rooms, she sat at her writing desk and became someone else, not lesser, truer.
In those hours the careful public composure lifted, and what was underneath was a woman who achd and worried and needed with an intensity she could never display in the daylight. And the person she became that woman for was Hick. The letters were extraordinary. They were frank about longing in a way that the era’s public discourse did not permit, did not even have language for.
Eleanor wrote about missing the sound of Hicks voice. She wrote about the ring still on her finger, still the first thing she looked at when the days grew long and difficult. She developed with Hick a private language, small phrases and codes that belonged only to them, the kind of intimacy that is built not in grand gestures, but in accumulated private reference.
There was a phrase in French. Eleanor’s translation was unnecessary. It means what it sounds like. They had made it their own. A kind of incantation between them, repeated in letters and sometimes said aloud on the telephone in the long distance calls that Eleanor made whenever the White House schedule permitted.
But one evening in 1933, Eleanor called Hick and could not say it. Her son James, then in his mid20s, was nearby, close enough to hear, and so Eleanor wrote afterward instead. carefully preserving what she had not been able to speak. I couldn’t say aador as I longed to do but always remember I am saying it and that I go to sleep thinking of you and repeating our little saying.
Our little saying, a private country with a population of two maintained in secret inside the most public house in America. Hick paid an enormous price for proximity to that country. The job she had taken instead, investigating the reach of the New Deal’s relief programs for Harry Hopkins, was meaningful work, and she did it with the same ferocious precision she had brought to journalism.
She traveled to 32 states, filing reports to Washington about who the programs were reaching and who they were missing. The reports were candid, occasionally damning, and widely read among the administration’s inner circle. She was useful. She was good at what she did.
But she was no longer Lena Hickok of the Associated Press. She was no longer the most celebrated female reporter in the country. She had walked away from the only identity she had ever built entirely for herself and walked toward a relationship that could not by its nature offer her equivalent standing in return.
Eleanor could not introduce her the way a partner is introduced, could not acknowledge her the way affection is publicly acknowledged. The press, which tracked Eleanor’s every movement with exhausting thoroughess, called Hick the first lady’s closest friend. and photographed them together occasionally at Hyde Park.
That was the entire visible surface of a thing that ran underneath 30 ft deep. By the late 1930s, the intensity of their early correspondence had begun to cool, not to disappear, but to settle into something quieter, more durable, and on Hicks side, considerably more painful. She had grown, in Eleanor’s biographer’s careful phrase, more demanding, which is to say she had begun to ask in various ways for more than the situation could give, more time, more visibility, more of the Eleanor who existed in the letters, and less of the Eleanor who belonged to the world. It was not an unreasonable thing to want. In 1940, Hick moved into the White House. She served as executive secretary to the women’s division of the Democratic National Committee and for
nearly 5 years she slept under the same roof as Eleanor Roosevelt more consistently in those years than Franklin Roosevelt did. The two women had dinner together, walked together, continued their correspondence even across the small distances of the building’s corridors. It was in its way a life.
Not the life either of them had imagined, but a life constructed from available materials inside the constraints of an arrangement the world had not been designed to accommodate. What the world did not know, what Eleanor herself had chosen perhaps not to examine too closely, was that the armed truce she had made with Franklin in 1918 had been for years quietly coming undone.
And on a warm afternoon in April of 1945, in a small cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia, that would become very clear. On the morning of April 12th, 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt was in Washington. She was at a benefit concert at the Saulgrave Club, a routine obligation, the kind of afternoon event that filled a first lady’s calendar by the dozen.
She was sitting in the audience, present and composed, when a message was passed to her. Call the White House. Franklin had collapsed. a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had gone to rest. By the time Eleanor received the message, he was already gone. She did not know that yet. She made the call and then another call, and somewhere in the course of those calls, she understood.
The 32nd president of the United States was dead. She composed herself in the way she had always composed herself, from the inside out, without visible assembly, and she boarded a plane south. It was on the way to Warm Springs that someone told her. The precise account varies in its details, as such accounts do.
What does not vary is the fact of it. Lucy Mercer Rutherford, the woman Franklin had promised Eleanor 27 years earlier he would never see again, had been at Warm Springs when he died. She had been sitting with him in the cottage, watching an artist paint his portrait when he reached up suddenly to touch his head and then lost consciousness.
She had been there in the room at the end. Elellanor had not been. According to the biographers who pieced together this day from the accounts of those present, Eleanor asked about the portrait when she arrived. The artist, Elizabeth Schumat, a friend of Lucy’s, had already packed her canvases and left.
Eleanor walked through the cottage quietly. She spoke to the staff. She made arrangements. She did not, as far as anyone recorded, raise her voice. But there was one more thing to understand. one more layer to what had been concealed from her. And this one came from closer than Washington, closer than Lucy Mercer’s polite return to private life. Her daughter Anna had known.
Anna Roosevelt, Eleanor’s eldest child, the girl she had raised in the house on 65th Street, the daughter who had become in recent years her father’s gatekeeper and companion. Anna had been aware of Franklin’s renewed contact with Lucy, had helped arrange it, in fact, had facilitated the meetings during the final years of the presidency that allowed the armed truce to be broken in the most complete way possible.
Eleanor said almost nothing about this for a long time. According to those close to her, the wound of Anna’s involvement ran deeper than anything Franklin had done. A husband’s betrayal, in Eleanor’s experience, was something she already knew how to carry. A daughter’s was a different kind of damage.
She returned to Washington. She oversaw the transition. The Trumanss came to lunch. The cabinet and staff said their goodbyes. The vast machinery of a presidential household began the process of disassembling itself around her. She moved with efficiency and grace through every obligation. 7 days after Franklin died, a reporter from the New York Times caught her in a corridor and asked about her plans.
According to contemporaneous accounts, she stopped, considered the question for a moment, and said quietly with no particular drama, “The story is over.” It was a sentence that could mean many things. It could mean the story of her public life, the role she had performed for 12 years.
It could mean the story of the Roosevelt administration, which had just closed its final chapter. It could mean the story of a marriage that had been for nearly three decades more structure than intimacy. The story of a woman who had stayed because leaving was not the kind of thing she did. Perhaps it meant all of those things.
Perhaps it meant none of them cleanly because 7 days after Franklin Roosevelt died, 7 days after the story is over, Eleanor Roosevelt sat down in the emptied White House and wrote a letter, not to a diplomat, not to a senator, not to any of the officials now circling the transition with their requests and their condolences.
She wrote to Hick. “The upstairs looks desolate,” she wrote on the 19th of April, 1945. “And I will be glad to leave tomorrow. It is empty and without purpose to be here now.” She wrote about the staff who had come to say goodbye, about the Trumanss at lunch, about the train she would take the following evening, and then near the end.
I hope you and I will be working together. And then I think of you and your love for travel and wonder if you would have enjoyed it. Read it again slowly. The White House empty and without purpose, Franklin dead for a week, and Eleanor’s first instinct not to grieve publicly, not to compose herself for the historical record, but to write to Hick and wonder whether she would have enjoyed the trip.
The story that was over was Franklin’s story. The story that was not over, that had in certain ways just been freed of the weight it had been carrying for 12 years, was the one written in letters in the dark in a private language, addressed to someone whose name appeared in no official account of that day.
Hick was waiting as she had always waited, as she would continue to wait in Long Island, then in Hyde Park, then in a cottage on the Roosevelt estate, for as long as Eleanor needed her to. It is perhaps the quietest love story in American political history, and like most quiet things, it outlasted everything louder.
Eleanor Roosevelt lived for 17 more years after Franklin died. They were by most measures the most fully herself years of her life. Harry Truman appointed her a delegate to the United Nations where she chaired the committee that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the document she considered the most important work she had ever done. She traveled the world.
She lectured, wrote, advocated, agitated. She became what the newspapers eventually called her, without irony, first lady of the world. She was in those final decades, the most admired woman on earth. Gallup’s annual poll said so year after year until it stopped being news and started being fact. Through all of it, Hick was somewhere nearby, not always close.
The intensity of their early years had settled by the 1950s into something quieter and more durable. Two women aging in parallel, connected by decades of shared history and the particular tenderness that survives when everything else has been stripped away. Hicks health had been declining for years.
The diabetes that had forced her from her career had worsened steadily, taking her mobility, then her stamina. Then by the end most of her sight. She had written books in those later years, biographies, histories, a memoir of Eleanor herself, working in the small hours when the pain allowed. In 1955, when the cottage on Long Island became too much to manage, Eleanor sent her car.
Hick moved to Hyde Park to a house on the Roosevelt property a few minutes from Eleanor’s own. Close enough for dinner. close enough for the kind of ordinary companionship that neither of them had been permitted to have in the decades when the whole country was watching. Eleanor Roosevelt died on the 7th of November, 1962. She was 78 years old.
The obituaries ran for pages. The tributes were enormous. She was buried in the Rose Garden at Hyde Park beneath a simple white stone. After that, Hicks decline was swift. She had spent 30 years accommodating herself to the particular dimensions of what Eleanor could offer, the distance, and the nearness, the public absence, and the private constancy, the letters, the ring, the French phrase repeated in the dark.
She had built a life inside those dimensions and she had managed mostly imperfectly to make it enough. Without Eleanor, the structure dissolved. She died on the 1st of May, 1968. She was 75 years old. She died in the house at Hyde Park, a short walk from where Eleanor lay in the Rose Garden. According to accounts of her final years, her ashes remained unclaimed for a long time.
The woman who had once been on the front page of every newspaper in the country, lying in the quiet of a funeral home, unannounced and un retrieved, she was eventually buried at Reinbeck Cemetery in 1993. In 1978, 10 years after Hicks death, as she had arranged, the staff at the Roosevelt Library unsealed 18 cardboard boxes.
Inside were letters, 30 years of them, spanning two lives. Staff members sat down at long tables in the reading room and began carefully to open envelopes that had not been touched since the women who wrote them were still alive. The first ones they read were dated March of 1933. “I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you,” the earliest one began.
You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you. Somewhere in those same boxes, in a letter from that same week, Eleanor had written about a ring, a sapphire set in diamonds, small enough to wear without explanation. She had looked at it and thought, “She does love me or I wouldn’t be wearing it.” She had been right.
And she had been alone with being right for 30 years. And the ring and the letter and the boxes and the library, they are all still there in Hyde Park in the quiet. Available to anyone who wants to look. Most people never do. Most people know Eleanor Roosevelt from the speeches, the photographs, the history books that describe her in terms of what she accomplished for others.
This is the other story. The one she kept in a drawer. The one she sealed and asked to be waited for. The one that outlasted everything. The White House, the war, the marriage, the public life, the death. even the silence she wrapped around it for 30 years. It was in the end just letters, just a ring, just a woman writing late at night to the only person who knew her completely.
Sometimes that is the whole of it.
