NMH Magazine : Spring 2005

Parting Words

In the summer of 1961, 16 years after FDR’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt was campaigning on behalf of New York mayor Robert F. Wagner. Caught in a particularly nasty Democratic primary, Wagner had enlisted help from the reform wing of the party, whose supporters included Adlai Stevenson and “Mrs. R” (as she was called). Still a towering national figure, at 76 she was feeling her years and picking her causes with care.

By mid-summer, Mrs. R was campaigning regularly. On August 16, her schedule called for a half-dozen evening stops in Queens with folk singer and actor Theodore Bikel and the local campaign coordinator. The plan was that at each stop, Bikel would sing, Mrs. R would be introduced, given a bouquet of flowers, and make a few remarks. The final requirement for the evening was to find a driver.

I was employed that summer by the reformers as a jack-of-all-trades for $75 per week. I’d become good friends with the campaign coordinator and was delighted when he asked me to be Mrs. R’s driver. However, the real reason for my selection had nothing to do with my minimal driving skills; it was because I was six foot, six inches tall, weighed some 220 pounds, and, at 23, could be expected to plow through a crowd (especially of senior citizens) and push aside mild nut cases from the increasingly frail Mrs. R.

At about 5:30, we picked up the former First Lady at her home, a brownstone on East 74th Street in Manhattan. The reform movement, always broke, had rented a small, standard-shift car without air conditioning. The tall Mrs. R sat in the “suicide seat,” as it was jocularly referred to in the pre-seatbelt era, next to me, her thoroughly frightened driver, who by 5:32 was envisioning  “MRS. ROOSEVELT HURT IN CAR CRASH” headlines as we weaved through rush-hour traffic toward Queens.

In fact, we were all so terrified of being with the famous Mrs. R that initially there was no conversation. Finally, with great trepidation, I asked her an innocuous question based on something I’d read in James M. Burns’s Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. That broke the ice, everyone relaxed, and Mrs. R began talking, especially about Mayor Wagner’s father (a US senator and close FDR ally), whom she’d liked and admired.

At each stop, speaking without notes, she discussed the themes of civic responsibility and open government. Privately she told us she’d been horrified at the speeches Wagner’s staff had written for her, and promptly discarded them.

When she began speaking, there was electricity in the air; you could feel the “pinch me” amazement that she was really there. She was a legend, her presence the real message to older voters who jammed every auditorium that evening.

But by mid-evening, as we predictably ran behind schedule and the car began to smell like a florist’s van, Mrs. R began to tire. Between stops she started to catnap, then fell into deeper and deeper sleep.

It was well after midnight when we got back to her house. She lived alone (unthinkable today) and let herself in with a key. At the door I asked where she wanted the flowers put. “Give them to your girlfriend,” she laughed. Since my girlfriend was a Los Angeles-based TWA stewardess, I gave the flowers to my mother, which brought me far better meals than expected for at least a week.

To the best of my knowledge, Eleanor Roosevelt never campaigned again—not surprising, considering she was suffering from aplastic anemia, a shortage of blood cells, which had worsened, likely because of her vigorous campaigning.

A week later I saw her at a political dinner. “How’s my favorite chauffeur?” she asked with a big smile (she had by then, quite naturally, forgotten my name) and moved on. v

John Lubetkin (at right, c. 1961)
lives in Virginia and is a retired cable-television executive.
He is the author of Union College’s Class of 1868 and is currently completing a book
on the Yellowstone surveying expeditions of 1871–73, the Northern Pacific Railroad, and George Custer.