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"Nothing Shameful." A year and a half after Lucy's marriage, F.D.R. was stricken with polio. Writes Daniels: "However complete or incomplete had been the reconciliation between Eleanor and Franklin after their marriage was threatened, now he was hers to serve and to save." Nonetheless, F.D.R. and Lucy were to be "attached by ties of deep and unbroken affection to the day he died." By all accounts, F.D.R. thereafter kept in frequent contact with Lucy. For example, says Daniels, he "quietly arranged for special tickets and a special car for Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd at his Inauguration" in 1933. He also visited the Rutherfurds' stately winter home in Aiken, S.C., several times, and the Rutherfurds called at the White House. Daniels says that Lucy visited the Little White House at Warm Springs, Ga., on several occasions. In fact, though her presence was unpublicized at the time, she was with Roosevelt there on the day he died—April 12, 1945. To the very last, according to Daniels, Mrs. Roosevelt was "bitter and jealous of Lucy."
Mrs. Rutherfurd died in a New York City hospital in 1948, in her 58th year. Last week her daughter, Mrs. Robert W. Knowles of Aiken, called Daniels' disclosures "quite a surprise to me." It was quite a surprise to a lot of people, and more details are bound to come out in the future. Daniels, for one, who called the liaison "nothing shameful" and "the beautiful affair of a great lady and a gentleman," intimated that he is considering following up his coup with a full-length account of "one of the great love stories of American history."