FDR and Lucy
Lovers and Friends
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
The last face FDR saw before he died was that of Lucy Mercer Rutherford, his mistress of thirty-one years. Although Eleanor, his children, and the press knew about Lucy, the American public would not hear of her until 1966. FDR and Lucy is the first book to delve into this hidden side of FDR's life. Drawing on documents from the Roosevelt Presidential Library as well as visits to Lucy's homes, biographer Resa Willis explores how this life-long love affair changed the course of his marriage and the presidency. Roosevelt fell in love with Lucy in 1914 and for the next three decades she provided him comfort from the pressures of his job and the critical eyes of his mother and wife. Illuminating a critical era in American history, Willis explores why the press dared not report the affair. Willis also suggests that Eleanor's discovery of Lucy in 1918 marked the end of the Roosevelt's personal marriage and the beginning of their political marriage and Eleanor's groundbreaking activism. A true love story with historical impact, FDR and Lucy paints a compelling portrait of one of the most famous other women in American history, giving us a window into FDR's impassioned life and presidency.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Willis does an efficient job of narrating the already well-known facts of FDR's relationship with Lucy Mercer. However, this story has been well told more than once by Geoffrey C. Ward, Blanche Wiesen Cook and Kenneth S. Davis. From a socially prominent but cash-strapped Maryland family, the Catholic Mercer became Eleanor Roosevelt's social secretary in 1914, when FDR was assistant secretary of the navy. An affair between Franklin and the alluring Lucy soon developed, only to be discovered by Eleanor in 1918. Eleanor offered FDR a divorce, but his indomitable mother threatened to disinherit him should he abandon his family, and he feared that a divorce scandal would end his political career. Franklin promised Eleanor that he would drop Lucy, but through the years he repeatedly saw his girlfriend on the sly, even after polio struck, and she married Winthrop Rutherfurd, a wealthy widower with six children. On one now-famous occasion, Franklin sent a limo to bring Lucy to his 1932 inauguration. As a final insult--of which Eleanor learned soon after--Lucy was in residence with FDR at the Warm Springs, Ga.,"Little White House" when he died in 1945. Willis, an English professor at Drury University and author of a book about Mark Twain and his wife, tells an interesting tale well, but it's not revelatory. 32 b&w photos.
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