![]() Four years ago, when reports of presidential misbehavior convulsed the country, I found myself wanting to tell the story of three people who comported themselves with dignity and grace in the face of imminent heartbreak and of an era that allowed them to. All three lingered in my consciousness long after the need for adolescent mutiny faded. My discovery of Lucy Mercer, FDR’s great love, complicated the story and humanized the characters. The void left by my father, who died shortly after the war, made the towering national patriarch even more irresistible. My love affair with her husband, which came later, was more personal and had to do as much with my adolescent yearnings as the great man’s achievements. ![]() In the 1950s and 1960s she was the fearless, indefatigable, right-minded woman every girl who knew there was more to life than cheerleading wanted to emulate. ![]() My fascination with Eleanor Roosevelt dates back to my childhood. Eleanor Roosevelt might have been a saint, but she was a saint with a faddish bent and a powerful peasant breath. Yet when I came across it, I heard the subversive rasp of a key turning in a lock. Unlike a formerly unpublished letter from which I finally got permission to quote, it wasn’t even classified. Unlike a chronology of events I later unearthed, the note was not a new discovery. It begins, “ER: her garlic pills (Sis could smell them on her breath).” It is covered with a penciled note in the kind of cryptic shorthand I and most writers I know use when insight or inspiration strikes. and Eleanor Roosevelt, there is a scrap of yellowing paper, about four inches by five. In the FDR Library in Hyde Park, among the effects of Anna Roosevelt Halsted, the only daughter of Franklin D.
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