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Recently discovered letters between FDR & Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd reveal their affair lasted longer than previously believed

“Intriguing .... Persico engagingly and eloquently narrates the tangled relationships between Franklin and the various women to whom he became close . . . . The major revelation of the volume - backed up by documents recently discovered by [Lucy] Mercer’s descendants—-is that her relationship with FDR continued throughout his life, even after it was supposedly ended by Franklin at the demand of his mother . . . . In sum, Persico offers what will prove an important, lasting addition to the literature of the Roosevelts. — Publishers Weekly

FRANKLIN AND LUCY
President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd and
the Other Remarkable Women in His Life

by Joseph E. Persico

** First Serial in U.S. News & World Report**

“Assiduously avoiding sensationalism, Persico paints a reliable portrait of the long-running Roosevelt-Rutherfurd affair based on a slew of new documentary evidence. You can’t properly understand FDR the man without reading this landmark study.” — Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University

“The women in Franklin Roosevelt’s life afford a unique perspective on this master of concealment, who had millions of friends and almost no intimates. Countless biographers have described this enigmatic giant; none has done a better job explaining him than Joe Persico. Utilizing new sources and his own matchless empathy, Persico introduces us to an FDR who is most human, and therefore accessible, because he is most emotionally vulnerable. In charting his lifelong search for a soul mate, the author bares Roosevelt’s soul. It makes for an unforgettable journey.”
— Richard Norton Smith, author of Patriarch and Thomas E. Dewey and His Times

“The riddle of FDR’s personality continues to fascinate more than sixty years after the president’s death. In Franklin and Lucy, Joseph Persico sheds new light on several of the most important relationships in Roosevelt’s life. You may not agree with all of his interpretations, but you would be hard-pressed to ignore the evidence he’s uncovered or the skill with which he spins his tale.”
— Geoffrey C. Ward, author of A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt

“By weaving together in a gripping narrative the long secret, fragmented, and misunderstood clues to Franklin Roosevelt’s private life, Joseph Persico provides illumination into the psyche of our most inscrutable president.”
— Verne Newton, former Director, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York

Bestselling author Joseph E. Persico sheds new light on our 32nd president in FRANKLIN AND LUCY: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd and The Other Remarkable Women in His Life (Random House; On Sale April 29, 2008). This new biography reveals recently discovered letters from FDR to Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, a woman with whom he was romantically involved in World War I. The letters and other personal writings were found among the possessions of the late Barbara Knowles, daughter of Lucy Rutherfurd, and copies were provided to Persico by Lucy and Alice Knowles, Rutherfurd’s granddaughters.

The book fills a long puzzling gap in the personal and emotional life of the President. While FDR’s involvement with Lucy Mercer during World War I and her reappearance late in his life, including the day of his death, are well documented, Persico has unearthed evidence of a secret romance that went unbroken for over almost thirty years and was severed only by death. The evidence includes correspondence from Roosevelt to Lucy during the 1920s, Lucy’s account of her conversation with FDR on the morning of the day he died, the remembrance she wrote after he died, a rare copy of one of Roosevelt’s few published writings (inscribed to Lucy), and various mementos and photos. These family possessions and the author’s research of primary source documents at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, and other archives establish that Roosevelt and Mrs. Rutherfurd were in each other’s company, or in contact through letters and telephone conversations throughout their adult lives.

In addition to exploring the relationship between Roosevelt and Mercer, Persico examines FDR’s character-revealing associations with several other women. FRANKLIN AND LUCY illuminates the shaping hand and near smothering love of his domineering mother, Sara, the long lasting tensions in his marriage to Eleanor, the marriage-like relationship with his closest aide, Missy LeHand, the unlikely confidant he made of his distant cousin, Daisy Suckley, and many associations with other women who fulfilled deep seated needs within Roosevelt for adulation, approval, unconditional love and diversion from his crushing burdens that his wife Eleanor alone could not provide.

Through Persico’s in depth look at the President’s private life and the women who helped form him, FRANKLIN AND LUCY casts a fresh light on Franklin Roosevelt’s opaque character and brings this towering figure to human dimensions.

About JOSEPH E. PERSICO
Joseph E. Persico’s books include the New York Times bestseller Roosevelt’s Secret War; Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour; Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, which was made into a major television docudrama; and Piercing the Reich, on the penetration of Nazi Germany by American agents. He is also the coauthor of General Colin Powell’s best selling autobiography, My American Journey. Persico lives in Guilderland, New York. Please visit his website at www.josephpersico.com.

FRANKLIN AND LUCY
President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life
Joseph E. Persico
Random House Hardcover • On Sale April 29, 2008
ISBN 978-1-4000-6442-7 • $28.00

www.randomhouse.com

The women who made a man out of FDR

By Jonathan Yardley
     Printed Sunday, April 27, 2008; The Washington Post

FRANKLIN & LUCY

President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life

By Joseph E. Persico

Random House. 443 pp. $28

On Jan. 30, 1882, after an "excruciating" labor that lasted more than 24 hours and left "her breath coming in shallow gasps, her skin turning blue," Sara Delano Roosevelt gave birth to a 10-pound boy, who was "lifeless and also blue." Only after the doctor "began blowing into the infant's mouth" did the baby at last begin to breathe and cry, but "so arduous had been the delivery, so close had the mother and baby come to dying, that the doctor cautioned Sara to have no more children."

She named the baby Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For the rest of her life, he was "the core of her existence." Coming from old New York money, she was in a position to grant her son his every wish -- indeed to grant him wishes he probably didn't know he had -- and she did precisely that. She could be suffocating, but in her fashion she was supportive and loving. She brought him up in the belief that he could do anything, and she "conditioned [him] to assume that a female presence in his life was there to serve and adore him," to have women around him "to whom he was the sun and they were his planets." This did not exactly leave him with what would now be considered an enlightened attitude toward women, but it did mean that women were more central to his life than they were to most of his male contemporaries, especially those who made politics their careers.

In addition to Sara, four other women played incalculably important roles in his life: Eleanor Roosevelt, his wife and cousin; Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, Eleanor's social secretary with whom he fell in love when he was in his 30s and with whom he remained in love for the rest of his life; Marguerite "Missy" LeHand, his secretary for two decades; and Anna, his favorite child, who during World War II took on many responsibilities in the White House for which the ever-busy Eleanor "had neither the time nor inclination." Other women make appearances in Joseph E. Persico's chronicle, but these five mattered most.

The marriage of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt is endlessly fascinating and endlessly mysterious. It took place in March 1905 over the strenuous objections of Sara. She was less concerned about a marriage of cousins -- these were not uncommon at the time, especially among New York bluebloods -- than about her apprehension that this shy, ungainly young woman was simply the wrong mate for her debonair, handsome son. To this day, it is difficult to see what drew FDR to Eleanor. She did take him seriously, at a time when few others did, and in the beginning she offered him complete adoration, but she hated the social life that he loved, she had little capacity for tenderness, and she found sexual relations repellent. Persico explores this issue intelligently, but in the end he is as baffled as everyone else has been: "That a young man of [such] gifts, an Adonis who could have easily won the hand of any number of more beautiful women, decided to choose Eleanor is either evidence of a then unsuspected depth in him or of the inexplicable choices of the human heart, or both."

Still, the marriage seems to have been reasonably happy in its first years, though what Eleanor "had been starved for, affection, warmth, above all intimacy with a soul mate, were not to be found in Franklin." She overcame her abhorrence of sex at least six times, as six children proved, and during the times when she and Franklin were separated, their letters were often affectionate. When he was appointed assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913 and the family moved to Washington, she hired, as her social secretary, the stunningly beautiful, 22-year-old Lucy Mercer, apparently with no thought that this might pose a threat to her marriage.

For quite a while the two women coexisted happily, and the Roosevelt children seem to have adored Lucy, but "between trips to Hyde Park and Campobello, Eleanor was often absent while Lucy continued to report to the Roosevelt house on N Street." By mid-1916, the attraction between FDR and the social secretary "had ripened into a love affair." Whether that "affair" was consummated apparently has never been known by anyone except FDR and Lucy, but the way Persico phrases the question -- "What do a thirty-five-year-old man who has sired six children and a twenty-six-year-old woman who is madly in love with him do when, by chance or design, they find themselves alone?" -- leaves little doubt as to his answer, and I think he's right. The times were different then, and people did not fall into bed together so easily and quickly as they do now, but it's hard to believe that these two healthy, hungry people were able to resist temptation.

By 1917 Eleanor was sufficiently suspicious that something was going on that she contrived a polite excuse to let Lucy go. Then, in 1918, when Franklin returned from an exhausting trip to Europe, she discovered in his luggage an incriminating packet of letters from Lucy. The ensuing confrontation must have been terrible, with Franklin saying he wanted his freedom and Eleanor urging "him to consider the effects of divorce on their children." Then came the confrontation with Sara, who told him that "she would cut him off without a cent and forfeit his right to inherit the estate," leaving him to choose between "freedom at a high price or living on in the comfortable prison of convention." He chose the latter, of course, largely for reasons of political ambition, and Eleanor agreed to remain with him, on two conditions: "that Lucy was to be effaced from his life" and that "he was never again to share [Eleanor's] bed."

The second condition may have given Franklin little pain, but the first proved unacceptable. Persico has obtained evidence that "there was never a complete break between Franklin and Lucy." It is common knowledge that she was with him in Warm Springs, Ga., at his death in April 1945, but throughout his presidency he found ways to stay in touch with her and to see her. Whether Lucy was more than a friend and companion during the White House years remains yet another mystery, but there seems no particular reason to believe that her clandestine visits to Warm Springs and even the White House were limited to "spiritual refreshment."

Compounding the mystery is the presence of Winthrop Rutherfurd, the wealthy and much older man Lucy married in 1920. He knew that she and Roosevelt were friends, but whether he knew more is unclear, as is what, if anything, he knew about her contacts with the president. She was a loyal and even devoted wife to him right up to his death in 1944, and a good stepmother to the six children from his first marriage. Indeed, virtually all the evidence indicates that she was a woman of exceptional decency, kindness, intelligence and discretion. By the same token, though, all the evidence indicates that she was in love with Franklin Roosevelt throughout her life, and that she was no mere puppet on the presidential string; she was as enthusiastic a participant in the clandestine assignations as he was, and she seems to have needed his company as badly as he needed hers.

There has been frequent speculation that Missy LeHand, who joined Roosevelt's staff in 1920, played a comparable role in his life, but this is less likely. As to Anna, she was the eldest of the Roosevelts' five surviving children (a boy died in infancy) and always enjoyed her father's strong affection, but it wasn't until late 1943 that the connection between them intensified. She had been living in Seattle with her husband, a newspaperman, but she came to the White House for Christmas and was persuaded by her father to stay on. By then Missy had been sidelined by a severe stroke -- she died the following summer, and "Anna proved smart and competent as she willingly took on Missy-like tasks, helping FDR serve at the cocktail hour, arranging the seating for dinners, dealing with callers for whom the president had no time." Roosevelt, Persico writes, "had found in his daughter a soul mate."

Persico -- a former speechwriter for W. Averell Harriman and Nelson Rockefeller who turned to writing popular histories three decades ago -- is judicious in his treatment of these sensitive matters. He gives each of FDR's five leading ladies her due, but he also is attentive to the others -- among them Dorothy Schiff, Grace Tully, Daisy Suckley and Alice Roosevelt Longworth -- who came into his orbit at various times and for various reasons. He is commendably nonjudgmental about the relationship between the two people of his title. Like Jean Edward Smith, Roosevelt's most recent and best biographer, he understands that Lucy Mercer helped FDR awaken his capacity for love and compassion, and thus helped him become the man to whom the nation will be eternally in debt. ·

Joseph E. Persico Historian/Biographer

Prior to beginning his career as a historian and biographer, Joseph E. Persico was chief speechwriter for New York governor and later U.S. vice president, Nelson A. Rockefeller.

Of Persico’s writing career, Eric Sevaried described his Edward R. Murrow: An American Original as “the definitive” biography of the broadcast pioneer. The New York Times said of Persico’s The Imperial Rockefeller, “No one has written a book like this about Nelson Rockefeller before.” His Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial was described by the broadcast journalist, Howard K. Smith, as “Simply the best account of the trial.” This book was adapted by Turner Network Television as a miniseries that won two Emmy awards. Persico was the collaborator on former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s autobiography, My American Journey which remained twenty weeks on the New York Times best seller list. His Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage also reached the best seller list and was chosen as one of the notable books of the year. His, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour, on Armistice Day, World War I, has been described by historian, Richard Norton Smith as, “The single finest work I have read on the Great War.” Persico’s next book soon to be published by Random House deals with the women prominent in the life of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

His articles have been published in American Heritage Magazine and the Military History Quarterly. He is a frequent reviewer for the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World and is a commentator on several PBS and History Channel documentaries.

Joseph E. Persico was born and grew up in Gloversville, NY, is married to the former Sylvia LaVista, has two daughters, five grandchildren and divides his time between upstate New York and Mexico.