After twenty-four hours in labor his mother was given an overdose of chloroform – Franklin Roosevelt was born blue, limp, lifeless. A doctor gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Prey to illness as a child, he suffered diseases throughout his life.
He married a shy awkward girl, his cousin Eleanor, who saw sex “an ordeal devoid of pleasure;” she gave birth to a son in 1916, told her daughter later the birth “was the end of any marital relationship, period.” His marriage turned into a mechanical partnership – his older son called it “an armed truce.”
At thirty-six he fell in love with Lucy Mercer. Eleanor offered him a divorce. His mother – who controlled the family money – said she’d cut him off without a cent.
Lucy married another man.
Returning from France at the end of World War I he had to be carried off the ship on a stretcher – he had influenza. Three years later, waking with a fever he stood up, his legs buckled; a doctor came, told him he had a cold – it would pass; the second doctor told him he had a blood clot on his spinal cord – massage was the cure; misdiagnosed twice, at last a third doctor told him he had polio. At a run-down mineral water spa in Warm Springs, Georgia he struggled to regain his leg muscles, crippled from the waist down.
Eleanor fell in love, wrote Lorena Hickock: ‘I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close…I kiss your picture good night and good morning.’ Lorena wrote Eleanor: ‘I remember…the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips.’ The two women lived together in a cottage Franklin built for Eleanor at Hyde Park.
He was elected president. Eleanor, traveling, seldom stayed in Washington – taking her mother’s place, during World War II his daughter Anna moved into the White House; staring at her father’s shaking palsied hands, hollow eyes, sent for a doctor – Roosevelt had clogged arteries, off the chart blood pressure, a failing left ventricle, congestive heart failure.
Lucy Mercer’s husband died.
He visited her in New Jersey, returned to Washington, asked Anna to host private dinners for him with Lucy at the White House. Anna stared back at her father appalled – met middle-aged Lucy, to her surprise liked her.
In April 1945 Roosevelt went to Warm Springs the last time – Lucy joined him; sitting in front of a stone fireplace in his cottage he said, I have a terrible headache, slumped sideways in his chair – a cerebral hemorrhage. He was dead two hours later.
Dressed in black Eleanor flew to Warm Springs; a cousin told her Lucy was in the room when Franklin died, about Lucy’s dinners with Franklin and Anna at the White House. Eleanor confronted her daughter – Anna told her she’d done it to ease her father’s ‘loneliness.’
Franklin Roosevelt’s marriage collapsed, he fell in love, lost his love, had influenza, polio, heart failure, a cerebral hemorrhage, died staring at the woman he loved – what strength carried him through a brutal life?
On D-Day, a year before he died, he prayed, Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation…have set upon a mighty endeavor…They will need Thy blessings…Men’s souls will be shaken…help us…let words of prayer be on our lips…O Lord, give us faith, give us faith in Thee…
(You can listen to Franklin Roosevelt’s entire D-Day Prayer here. Many of these stories are in The Allies by Winston Groom.)
