The Women the President Loved

In 1931, when Franklin Roosevelt was considering whether he should, and could, run for the presidency, he called in three physicians to advise on his physical capability. They reported that the man who had contracted polio ten years earlier, losing all movement in his legs, was indeed in good health—and, furthermore, that he had "no symptoms of impotentia coeundi." "In plain English," writes historian Joseph E. Persico, "he could sustain an erection."

It is a significant detail for Persico, given the questions he seeks to answer in his new book, "Franklin and Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life": Did he have an ongoing relationship with Lucy Mercer (later Rutherfurd)? Was it sexual? Was she the only one? His answers to each are yes, undoubtedly, and no.

The charming, pretty Lucy was employed by Eleanor Roosevelt as her social secretary in 1913. Five years later, a stricken Eleanor discovered a bundle of love letters from Lucy to her husband—at which point, Eleanor wrote, "the bottom dropped out of my particular world." She offered Franklin a divorce, but his mother threatened to disinherit him, and his political adviser cautioned that accepting it would destroy his chances of becoming president. FDR returned to his wife, promising that he would never again share the marital bed—or see his lover, who married a man 29 years her senior.

We have long known that Lucy came back into FDR's life in his White House years (she was with him when he was stricken at Warm Springs). Persico, however, is the first to document, with letters FDR wrote to Lucy between 1925 and 1928, how early Roosevelt began breaking his promise to Eleanor. The contact between Lucy and FDR, he says, was "almost unbroken" for decades: they spoke on the phone often; she visited him 40 to 50 times in the White House, usually under the name "Mrs. Paul Johnson"; she was present at each of his inaugurations, and FDR orchestrated "accidental" meetings while driving through the Virginia countryside. "If the relationship was simply the shared companionship of old friends," Persico asks, "why all the machinations to conceal it?"

FDR had a host of close female companions, who Persico says were the "oxygen to his soul." They included his cousin Daisy Suckley, his secretaries Missy LeHand and Grace Tully, and Princess Martha of Norway. Persico speculates about sexual dalliances with some of them, not always convincingly. What is certain, though, is that they all adored him, and he very much liked being adored, flattered and flirted with. He once told a friend that "nothing is more pleasing to the eye than a good-looking lady, more pleasing to the spirit than the company of one."

What is unfortunate in the telling of the story of FDR's romances is that it too often becomes a recounting of Eleanor's supposed inadequacies. The fact that the "stunningly handsome" Franklin had been attracted to a woman with buck teeth and large feet "who never rises above plain" was perplexing to begin with, Persico writes. She was no match to her rival: "Lucy was far more appealing. Her teeth did not protrude, her chin did not recede, as did Eleanor's. Lucy's posture was regal while Eleanor's was stooped. She had a velvety voice … Eleanor's was high-pitched."