When State Senator Franklin Delano Roosevelt moved from Albany to Washington in 1913 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he took up residence with his wife and young children in a comfortable rented house on N Street in Georgetown. After a few months, 30-year-old Eleanor Roosevelt, even then a woman of wide and active interests, found it difficult to manage a household while keeping up with the capital's intellectual and social whirl. She hired a social secretary to work, as she later recalled, "three mornings a week." Her new helper was tall, strikingly attractive Lucy Page Mercer, 22, the daughter of a socially impeccable Maryland family that had lately fallen on hard times. To Roosevelt, then 31, Lucy Mercer became far more than a mere employee. In fact, says a World War II aide of the late President, F.D.R. and Lucy began a romance that was to span 30 years.
The aide, Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer, whose father Josephus had been Roosevelt's boss as Secretary of the Navy, makes this claim in his new book The Time Between the Wars. The story of the romance is not exactly new. Columnist Westbrook Pegler insinuatingly linked F.D.R. with Lucy in the 1940s as part of his vendetta against the Roosevelts. In The Crisis of the Old Order, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote that "Eleanor may have sensed something" about her husband's "friendly affection" for Lucy, whom Schlesinger described as "a sweet, womanly person, somewhat old-fashioned in manner but gay and outgoing." Finally, Daniels himself, in his 1954 book The End of Innocence, told of "rumors" involving the pair. But it remained for Daniels' new book to squarely designate Lucy as F.D.R.'s other love.
"Wharton World." The F.D.R.-Lucy relationship, writes Daniels, was "an affair which almost broke his marriage to Eleanor." So tense did life on N Street become that in 1917 Mrs. Roosevelt put off going to the family's retreat at Campobello Island off the Maine coast, and then "evidently, when she was gone, wrote of her sense of unwantedness." In a return letter from Washington, F.D.R. assured her: "You were a goosy girl to think or even pretend to think that I don't want you here all the summer, because you know I do! But, honestly, you ought to have six weeks straight at Campo." Eleanor stayed, but she could hardly have been reassured when F.D.R. candidly wrote her of Potomac cruises with Lucy and others. By the time they arrived in Washington, the Roosevelts already had three children, Anna, 7, James, 5, and Elliott, 3. Franklin Jr. was born in 1914, and their last child, John, in 1916.