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

elsewhere.”
    Franklin had his entourage, many of whom not only worked in the White House but composed part of the First Family. Missy occupied a suite of rooms on the third floor. But there were others who were frequent, long-term guests, including Crown Princess Martha of Norway and FDR’s cousins Daisy Suckley and Laura Delano. These women provided him with diversion and unquestioning loyalty. Franklin, of course, was not a stranger to strong women. His mother had been mistress of all that transpired at Hyde Park. But Sara’s identity was drawn entirely from her husband, her son, her domestic empire. Typical for a man of his generation, FDR was not especially comfortable with women who challenged him intellectually. The Eleanor he married was not the assertive, competent, self-confident woman she would become.
    FDR liked his women pliant and seductive. Once, when his wife told him that he was to dine alone with Madame Chiang, the tough-minded wife of Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek, the president replied heatedly,“Indeed I shan’t! I am going to bed early!” Eleanor later remarked, “I don’t think that Franklin likes women who think they are as good as he is.” His daughter, Anna, was also hurt by this. “Pa seems to take for granted that all females should be quite content to ‘keep the home fires burning,’ and that their efforts outside of this are merely rather amusing and to be aided by a patronizing male world only as a last resort to keep some individually troublesome female momentarily appeased,” she wrote her husband, John Boettiger, noting that her mother “goes along very strongly with me in our feeling that OM [Old Man] is a stinker in his treatment of the female members of his family.”
    Though FDR admired Eleanor’s single-mindedness and her moral absolutism, he could take them only in limited doses. Presidential adviser Harry Hopkins, a close friend of both Roosevelts, recalled one such occasion. Eleanor had been relentlessly trying to reach her husband, to plead for a stay of execution for a convicted black sharecropper. FDR was equally determined to avoid his wife’s calls. “Mrs. Roosevelt,” Hopkins remembered, “would not take no for an answer. The president finally got on the phone himself and told Mrs. Roosevelt, that under no circumstances would he intervene ….” It may have been awkward at times for Hopkins to navigate between the two Roosevelts, but, Hopkins once admitted, “I never cease to admire Eleanor’s burning determination to see that justice is done.”
    “FDR sometimes was impatient because he was tired and Mrs. Roosevelt had something important she wanted to tell him,” Trude Lash recalled. “She wanted him to do something right away. The people around him very often didn’t tell him the truth. It is so tempting to only say agreeable things to the president. And they would tell him how wonderful things were, either because they were involved or they didn’t want to get hurt by it or they didn’t want him to get upset. But she would tell him. She had the courage not to get discouraged. And the president knew this.”
    Eleanor also had her “court.” Earl Miller, a former state trooper who became Eleanor’s driver, bodyguard and companion, was a key member of her entourage. A physically powerful man, Miller taught her to shoot, drive and ride. He encouraged her to overcome her fear of sports and the outdoors. When, much later, Lash asked Earl if the rumor of an affairbetween him and the first lady were true, Miller answered, “You don’t sleep with someone you call Mrs. Roosevelt.” Still, Earl clearly filled the need for masculine presence in Eleanor’s life. In all her homes, there was always a room for Earl.
    Joe Lash, the melancholy young man who became her biographer, was also a fixture in her life. Eleanor loved Joe with an almost adolescent intensity. She frequently signed off her letters to him, “I love you,” a formulation she almost