Free Eleanor by Joseph P. Lash Page A

hall, one of my father and the other of my mother. The two figures are symbolic of history’s recognition that not only were they a team, but a team of equals. What is made visible in the splendid displays and exhibits at the library is given life here in these pages.

Author’s Note

    I MUST AGAIN ACKNOWLEDGE MY INDEBTEDNESS TO THOSE who assisted me with Eleanor and Franklin and who also helped with Eleanor: The Years Alone . In connection with this book I am particularly grateful to A. David Gurewitsch, who made his files and his splendid collection of photographs available to me. Maureen Corr, who became Mrs. Roosevelt’s private secretary after Malvina Thompson’s death, was generous with her recollections, as was Mrs. Roosevelt’s old friend Esther Lape. I wish also to thank the friends who kindly read these pages, including Dr. John P. Humphrey, and Egon Schwelb and Giorgio Pagnanelli of the Human Rights Division of the United Nations.
    I am happy to record my obligation once more to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, whose present director, Mr. J. C. James, was as cooperative as his predecessors, and to Mr. Jerry Deyo, audio-visual archivist, and William F. Stickle, staff photographer.
    My sister Elsie Lash typed this manuscript as she did the earlier one.
    It was my editor at W. W. Norton & Company, Evan Thomas, who felt that the first volume should end with the death of FDR and that Mrs. Roosevelt’s years alone should be written as another book. He was right about this, as he was about so many other matters connected with the Eleanor Roosevelt volumes.
    Finally, I wish again to record my indebtedness to my wife, Trude. How much she has been a companion in this enterprise is suggested by a letter that I wrote in 1967 to Franklin Jr. and to the publisher and placed alongside my will in which I expressed the hope that in the event I was unable to finish this book they would ask her to do so.

Preface

    A FEW DAYS AFTER FRANKLIN’S DEATH, A NEWSPAPERWOMAN intercepted Eleanor Roosevelt at the doorway of her Washington Square apartment in New York City, the one which she had selected with an eye to Franklin’s using it after the White House years, and asked her for a statement. “The story is over,” Mrs. Roosevelt said quietly and hurried on.
    If precedent was any guide, the story would be over. Previously, presidential wives, after the death of their husbands, quickly sank into obscurity and were seldom seen or recalled except on ceremonial occasions. But this presidential wife was different. It was a measure only of Mrs. Roosevelt’s lingering insecurity and modesty that after thirteen strenuous years in the White House she could still believe that she was so widely admired—and hated—not in her own right but because she had been FDR’s wife, and could still wonder whether with his death her public career might not be finished.
    Yet, the same qualities that had turned this protected daughter of old New York into an uncompromising champion of the poor and oppressed, that had transmuted her beloved but alcoholic father’s letters into a primer of youthful virtues and strengths, that had enabled her to remake her marriage after the discovery of her husband’s unfaithfulness into a journey of self-discovery and a partnership of immense usefulness to America foretold that Eleanor Roosevelt, now standing alone and speaking for herself, would leave her mark on the times.
    She had overcome so much, turned so many difficulties into points of growth. She had emancipated herself from the insularand caste-minded society into which she had been born and, in a relentless battle of wills, had freed herself from the domination of a strong-minded mother-in-law who had embodied the values of that society. She had established a unique relationship of independence and partnership with her husband. A homely adolescent with a deep sense of inadequacy because of her physical plainness, she had grown into a woman of poise,