Read Online Kati Marton by Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History - Free Book Online Page B

singular personalities. In fact, Eleanor and Franklin’s identities and contributions were vastly more separate and distinct than Bill and Hillary Clinton’s. But then the freedom and the creativity with which the Roosevelts were allowed to manage their affairs over a half century ago is beyond the reach of present-day presidential couples.
    Unlike Hillary, Eleanor did not have to plead with the public and the media for a “zone of privacy.” The culture of the time deemed it her right. Leading separate lives enabled the Roosevelts to preserve their marriage without the American people knowing the emotional cost of the effort. But the White House has sheltered other imperfect marriages that did not produce such an activist first lady. Imbued with extraordinary stamina and idealism, Eleanor was a born reformer who, in a different time, might have become a missionary. She took full advantage of her position as first lady to do her heart’s bidding. If her husband gave herfull rein to do so, it was because it suited both his personal and political needs. Ultimately, the country benefited from the Roosevelts’ unconventional union. They were, in many ways, the first modern couple to occupy the White House.

    THE PARTNERSHIP DID NOT START OUT THAT WAY. Eleanor and Franklin were born into the most privileged of nineteenth-century New York society, a world to which one either did or did not belong. Both sets of parents possessed money, land, connections and a strong sense of entitlement. The Roosevelts on both sides emulated the values, tastes and pretensions of the British aristocracy. Like the rest of their social class, their parents’ energy and focus was spent in the ritual migrations of the East Coast privileged class: from New York to Long Island, Newport or Maine, and the yearly tours of the Continent. Their calendars were marked with metronomic precision: the opening of the Opera, the coming-out parties, high teas and regattas. Everyone within their circle knew his or her place, knew the rules and certainly knew the other players within the circle.
    Franklin, the only child of an elderly Hudson River squire and his much younger wife, was the center of his parents’ universe. His childhood was spent in Hyde Park, New York, in one of the great river houses on a large forested estate. Until he left for boarding school at Groton, the household revolved around this extraordinarily handsome and good-natured little boy. Franklin’s struggle as an only child was to snare a bit of freedom from his excessively loving, overly protective mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt. She wanted too much from her child, so he learned to keep his own counsel. Dissembling became a key to Franklin’s survival. No one—not his wife, not his children, not the women he loved—ever pierced the protective shell he began to construct during those early years. The fact that his nearest friend lived a mile and a half away reinforced the boy’s self-reliance and isolation from his peers. What Franklin was prepared for, first at Hyde Park and later at Groton and Harvard, was a life of ease among those of his own class. He set off for the world a breathtakingly secure man, skillful at keeping his emotional distance with charm and good manners.
    Eleanor’s childhood is the story of a chain of losses. She was thesolemn child of frivolous, beautiful parents. Her mother was a society belle who did not hide her disappointment that her daughter was plain. You have no looks, she told the child she called “Granny,” see to it that you have manners. “Attention and admiration,” Eleanor later said, were the two things she longed for in her childhood. She never had a chance to win either from her mother, who died when Eleanor was eight. Her father, who made up for her mother’s constricted love with effusive outpourings, was not a steady presence in the little girl’s life. Eleanor nonetheless adored the man who called her his “little Nell.” When, two