finding the truth
It is the summer of 1918.
The world war is in its final months.
And Franklin Roosevelt, the thirty-six-year-old US Assistant Secretary of the Navy, is in England and France on a two-month fact-finding tour which brings him face-to-face with the men formulating Allied war policy.
He meets with ministers, military commanders, rising politicians, and a king; attends fancy dinners; meets the ruling social classes; makes speeches; inspects naval installations; and even meets his future brother-in-arms, Winston Churchill, briefly.
It is a bracing experience which brings FDR into the heart of war-planning, teaching him lessons for the future.
FDR had entered France through the harbor at Dunkirk.
There, he had seen the massive scale of armaments, food and supplies, and the logistical infrastructure needed to keep a combined fighting force of hundreds of thousands of men on the offensive.
FDR had walked the French battlefields of Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood and Verdun and seen the wasted remains of once-prosperous villages and farms after armies had battled there to the death.
From his diary:
“[R]usty bayonets, broken guns, discarded overcoats and ration tins, rain-stained love letters,
“men buried in shallow graves, some unmarked, some with rifles stuck in the earth bayonet down,
“and some, too, with a whittled little cross and a tag of wood or wrapping paper hung on it and in a pencil scrawl an American name.”
As his trip reached an end in late September, FDR contemplated resigning his sub-cabinet position and enlisting in a naval artillery unit to get a taste of battle, a thrill which would amplify his political credentials.
He’d planned to consider the resignation question while aboard the USS Leviathan, the troop transport ship which would carry him home to New York.
But FDR had grown bone-tired in his last days in Europe.
On the day of his departure, he’d managed to climb the gangway to board the Leviathan but had collapsed as soon as he reached his cabin.
FDR had contracted the Spanish Flu as well as pneumonia.
He’d spend the voyage in bed.
Others on board were also sick.
An untold number died and were buried at sea.
After receiving a telegram from the Leviathan, Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin’s mother, Sara, met the ship at the New York dock with an ambulance.
FDR was rushed to his mother’s East Side apartment where doctors and both women cared for him.
And, as he drifted in and out of consciousness, Eleanor unpacked his suitcase.
There, inside the suitcase and tied together with string, Eleanor found a bundle of love letters which her former social secretary, Lucy Mercer, had written to FDR while he was abroad.
Many people had known of FDR’s affair with Lucy, but Eleanor had been kept in the dark.
Eleanor writes to a friend years later:
“The bottom dropped out of my own particular world,
“and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”
FDR’s marriage was irretrievably lost.
And while there would be no divorce, there would be no end to his relationship with Lucy.
Years later, when FDR passed away in Warm Springs, Georgia, it would be Lucy who’d be with him.
Not Eleanor.
*******************************
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
Banner image: FDR, second from the right, in France, August 1918.
Share this post