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

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In this work Joseph Persico succeeds in bringing to the reader an extraordinarily personal view of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The author manages to avoid reverting to simple adulation, and instead does a fine job of presenting a balanced view of FDR's personal life. What emerges from this is the story of a complicated and multifaceted man.

FDR was, first and foremost, a member of the American Eastern Establishment. As a close relative of Theodore Roosevelt during the latter's heyday, and as one who derived from two patrician American family lines (the Delanos and the Roosevelts) Franklin D. Roosevelt was born to privilege. He never wanted for money, and the author explains in considerable detail that when young Franklin wanted or needed money, when he needed bills paid, or pretty much anytime money was called for, his mother simply wrote the check. Not once but several times his mother gifted the young Roosevelts mansions and townhomes. Young Franklin simply never had to think about money. The author explains how, in those days, members of FDR's social class were more or less automatically admitted to top Ivy League Eastern schools, and afterwords guaranteed high-paying jobs in business or the professions (in FDR's case the legal profession). Grades and merit meant little; family name and background everything. In fact, it was bad form to be a "grind" and aspire to a high grade-point average. That was for "scholarship boys" who lacked money. (It is hard to imagine this today. In my USC law school class, with very few exceptions the top law firms were first and foremost concerned with one's grades and class academic standing and the competition for academic merit was ferocious.)

The core of this book, of course, deals with Roosevelt's relationships with women. In those days the press simply did not publicize the affairs of top political figures. The author masterfully analyzes FDR's relationship with his wife Eleanor, and thoroughly documents his life-long intimate relationship with Lucy Mercer (later Lucy Mercer Rutheford) and his secretary-assistant Missy LeHand. These relationships were no great secret to those in the know, but the public imagined that FDR and Eleanor had a more or less "normal" marriage. After Eleanor discovered the love letters between Lucy Mercer and FDR (in 1918), they did not. But in those days divorce for FDR's class more or less constituted social and political suicide, and thus the marriage persisted, but as a partnership of two very different people who did not love one another. FDR's relationship with Ms. LeHand is particularly interesting. What emerges is the fact that while Ms. Mercer was undoubtedly the great love of FDR's life, he also had an intimate relationship with Missy LeHand, and she was undoubtedly the one indispensable person in his life as he rose in politics and became President. It is no exaggeration to say that she was madly in love with him, and that FDR was her whole life.

This piece also does a fine job of documenting FDR's struggle with polio. I had not realized until I read this piece how physically incapacitated President Roosevelt had been. He could not get out of bed without help, for example. He may have been born to wealth, privilege, and prestige, but it is also true that even given these tremendous advantages (and they were tremendous advantages) only an extraordinary human being could have overcome this physical limitation the way that Franklin Roosevelt did. Other biographers have detailed FDR's political ruthlessness and drive--that same steely determination, combined with Roosevelt's innate optimism and refusal to admit defeat, enabled him to live an extraordinary life and overcome his physical limitations.

I bought the Kindle edition of this book, and I was pleased to note that the photographs in the book are rendered well. And there are several interesting photos of FDR and the women of his life.

This book is not a gossip piece; it is far more than that. It is a glimpse into the American upper-class as it was in the early twentieth century, and above all an insightful and intimate look at the life of one of the giants of those times. Highly recommended.

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