Free Kati Marton by Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History

years after her mother’s death, her father died of alcoholism, she and her two younger brothers were left the wards of their grandmother.
    Eleanor’s salvation came when, at fifteen, she was sent to the Allenswood Academy, a progressive boarding school near London. She arrived in England a bundle of fears and insecurities. The headmistress of Allenswood was the first to perceive that the shy girl had an extraordinary quality. Despite Eleanor’s pedigree, she was seen to have an open mind, avid to learn and hungry for every new idea. And she had something else: a humanity that set her apart. When she returned home after three years at Allenswood, Eleanor had a stronger sense of herself. She had been encouraged to use her mind, and she had shone. “For the first time in all my life,” she said, “all my fears left me.”
    When Franklin accidentally encountered his fifth cousin Eleanor on a train, he saw a more self-assured young woman, no longer trying quite so hard to bend to society’s expectations of who she should be. She was tall and graceful, with beautiful eyes, thick, fair hair and a lively curiosity Franklin had not encountered in a girl of his set. “E. is an angel,” he wrote in code in his diary, to keep his mother in the dark. A year later, the two Roosevelts were engaged. Sara Roosevelt, not yet ready to share her adored son, tried and failed to keep them apart. Eleanor was given away in marriage by her uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, on March 17, 1905.
    Despite such similar backgrounds, and even a blood tie, the couple’s differences were clear. Franklin, tall and conventionally handsome, used his all-is-well smile to keep the world at arm’s length. “If something was unpleasant,” Eleanor later said of her husband, “he didn’t want to knowabout it; he just ignored it …. I think he always thought that if you ignored a thing long enough, it would settle itself.” Relentlessly charming, he could talk for forty minutes at a stretch on any subject, so long as it was not personal. He liked sending people away happy.
    Eleanor, intense and still somewhat insecure, inept at small talk, impatient to “be useful,” longed to connect more than socially. Moreover, deprived in childhood of the focused devotion which Franklin had had in excess, she hungered for intimacy. “You could not find two such different people as Mother and Father,” their daughter, Anna, noted. But neither Roosevelt knew nor cared much about their differences. Photographs show a secret joy, almost a look of relief, on their faces during this period. Franklin was declaring his independence from his mother. Eleanor, who had never had a steady, loving presence in her life, thought she had found it in Franklin. “Everything is changed for me now,” she wrote him. “I am so happy. Oh! so happy and I love you so dearly. I cannot begin to write you all I should like to say, but you know it all I am sure and I hope that you, too, dearest are very very happy.” For the first time in her nineteen years, she dared drop her reserve and entrust someone with her deepest feelings. “Dearest Honey,” she wrote him when they were apart, “I miss you dreadfully and feel very lonely, but please don’t think it is because I am alone, having other people wouldn’t do any good for I just want you!”
    The young lovers tried to placate Franklin’s mother, who still tried her best to keep them apart. “Not only I but you are the luckiest and will always be the happiest people in the world,” Franklin wrote Sara, “in gaining anyone like E. to love and be loved by.” But Sara would not cede her preeminent position in her son’s life. Nor was it in his nature to confront her directly. How much pain Franklin might have spared Eleanor had he been willing to draw clearer boundaries.
    No doubt Franklin and Eleanor saw in each other their own missing qualities. He was drawn to her serious, high-minded side and the generous empathy he did