The Illusion of Victory (24 page)

He soon discovered their parents were only part of their problems. Quentin’s proposal produced a crisis in Flora’s mind and heart. She revealed for the first time how much Quentin intimidated her with his quotes from Dostoyevsky, his insider’s political observations, his literary gifts. Flora feared she was “too ordinary” for him. Quentin responded with the timeless philosophy of lovers:“If two people really love each other nothing else matters. . . . I might be a Mormon and you an Abyssinian polyandrist and everything would be all right because you can’t get beyond love.”
⁵⁸

By the end of May, Quentin had the answer he was seeking, and it was his turn to be intimidated.“I don’t yet see how you can love me,” he wrote. “I feel as if it were all a dream from which I shall wake . . . with nothing left to me but the memory of the beauty and the wonder of it all. You see I know how very ordinary I am and how wonderful you are.”
⁵⁹

Meanwhile Quentin was learning to fly in cumbersome Curtiss Jenny aircraft that could barely make sixty miles per hour. Nevertheless there was a tremendous thrill in conquering the sky. Quentin had had to overcome some rather serious physical disabilities to get into the air. His eyesight was terrible; he had been forced to memorize the eye chart in advance. He had also managed to conceal a bad back, injured in a fall from a horse during an Arizona camping trip the previous summer. Between them, these limitations made him a less than first-class pilot. His landings were clumsy and his takeoffs often hair-raising. But there was no doubt that he would graduate from Mineola’s rudimentary training school. The U.S. Army Air Service had a grand total of thirty-five pilots and was inclined to give a commission to anyone who could get a plane off the ground and keep it in the air for a while.
⁶⁰

Quentin and Flora mutually dedicated themselves to persuading their families to accept them as a couple. In a matter of weeks, Flora had utterly charmed Theodore Roosevelt and defrosted much of the chill in his far more disapproving wife, Edith. A glimpse of his mother’s attitude is visible in a note Quentin wrote to Edith, remarking he was glad she liked Flora, now that she “had got past the fact that she was a Whitney and powdered her nose.”
⁶¹

With an absolute minimum of thought, the War Department decided that Quentin and his group of ten barely trained fliers would go to Europe as an advanced guard of what Secretary of War Newton Baker called “an army of the air.” For Quentin and Flora, the decision meant the most painful word in love’s vocabulary, separation. In mid-July 1917, a week before he sailed, Quentin brought Flora to dinner at Sagamore Hill and confided to his parents that they were engaged. They did not perform a similar ritual in Old Westbury. There the secret remained unspoken, while Flora struggled to find the courage to tell her parents.

On July 23, 1917, Flora joined Edith and TR at the Hudson River pier where Quentin’s troopship was docked. When the sailing was delayed, the elder Roosevelts tactfully went home, leaving the lovers alone. They walked up and down for hours, waiting for the cry of All Aboard. Finally, Quentin sent Flora home to her family’s mansion at 871 Fifth Avenue. There, she told Quentin,“the accumulated sea of tears” became a great gulf in her throat. Still she did not weep. She had decided it would be unworthy of their love.
⁶²

In Quentin’s pocket when the troopship sailed was a letter from Flora, written on July 19. “All I do from now on will be for you,” she wrote.“I will do something—wait and see—so when you do come back I will be more what you want—more of a real person and a better companion and you will care for me as much as I care for you.”
⁶³

Quentin confessed to his parents that he felt down after Flora went home. He tried to cheer up them and himself by confidently predicting he would be “back sometime within a year.” to Flora he admitted his hopes were tinged with darkness:“If I am not killed, there will be a time when I shall draw [sail] into New York again, and you will be there on the pier, just as you were when I left, and there will be no parting for us for a long time to come.”
⁶⁴

While the Roosevelts headed for the war, their cousin Franklin continued to do his utmost to unseat his boss, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. The assistant secretary invited the well-known American historical novelist Winston Churchill, an Annapolis graduate, to do a study of the navy’s efficiency and morale. The writer found many faults and sent to the president (a personal friend) a confidential report that gave Daniels some hard knocks for “dilatoriness.” At one point, Churchill opined that the secretary’s slow-motion style threatened to “paralyze the activities of the naval service.” But Wilson made no move to reprimand much less fire Daniels, and Franklin glumly concluded in a letter to Eleanor that it would “take lots more of the Churchill type of attack.”
⁶⁵

Franklin’s rumor-mongering assistant, Louis Howe, was still hard at work trying to crank up such an assault in the nation’s newspapers and magazines. This campaign came to an abrupt stop when George Creel appeared in Franklin’s office and “let [Howe] have it right between the eyes.” Creel was an ardent Daniels backer and had helped quash calls to replace him during the 1916 presidential campaign. He had gotten Admiral George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, to issue a glowing encomium of the secretary. As head of the CPI, Creel had put tracers on the “old canards” about Daniels’s inefficiency and unpopularity that were sprouting in various newspapers. The tracers led straight to Howe, who spluttered that he was actually trying to defend Daniels. Creel replied that if he heard any more of his “phony explanations” he would tell the whole story to President Wilson,“who had a very precise idea of what constituted loyalty.”
⁶⁶

Franklin may have been able to bear his aborted ambition with equanimity for a very personal, extremely private reason. He was in love. The object of his passionate affection was twenty-six-year-old Lucy Mercer, a willowy, brown-haired descendant of one of the first families of Maryland, whose alcoholic father had dissipated not only himself but also his wife’s fortune.

Eleanor hired Lucy as her private secretary in 1914, when she was feeling overwhelmed by raising five children and playing Washington hostess. Her tender heart was undoubtedly touched by Lucy’s sad family story and its similarity to her tormented childhood with her own alcoholic father, Elliott Roosevelt. The charming Miss Mercer soon became a member of the family, often invited to fill out dinner parties and join the Roosevelts on Potomac cruises about the Navy yacht
Sylph.
She even impressed Franklin’s formidable mother as “sweet and adorable.”

When Lucy and Franklin became lovers is uncertain, but there is little doubt that they were deeply involved by the summer of 1917—and Eleanor was uneasily suspecting the worst. She terminated Lucy’s employment, but the charming Miss Mercer immediately enlisted in the navy and was—surprise surprise—assigned to duties in the State, War and Navy Building.
⁶⁷

When the time came for Eleanor to take the children to their summer home on Campobello Island in Passamaquoddy Bay, just off the Maine coast, she resisted and delayed and finally accused Franklin of trying to get rid of her. Franklin called her a “goosey girl” and finally persuaded her and their brood to depart. He was soon writing her soothing letters about how much he missed her and “hated the thought” of their childless Washington house. He casually mentioned in his letters more cruises on the Potomac and other outings that included Lucy and Nigel Law, a young British diplomat who was acting as his complaisant beard. As for coming to Campobello, Franklin suddenly found the press of navy business overwhelming and canceled several departure dates.

Gossip began swirling through Washington while Eleanor’s uneasiness mounted. Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice, married to Congressman Nicholas Longworth, himself a notorious womanizer, saw Franklin and Lucy tooling along a Maryland lane in an open car and sent him a sly note. Alice promptly invited the couple to a dinner party.“He deserved a good time,” Alice reportedly said.“He was married to Eleanor.”
⁶⁸

When Franklin came down with a sore throat and high fever, Eleanor rushed to Washington to nurse him. Before she left him on August 14, they apparently had a major argument about just when he was coming to Campobello. The next day she wrote with uncharacteristic sternness: “I count on seeing you the 26th [of August]. My threat was no idle one.” Had she threatened to discuss her suspicions with his mother, who held the family purse strings? This time Franklin showed up and stayed long enough to restore Eleanor’s confidence in his affection.
⁶⁹

That fall, after Eleanor and her children had returned to Washington, with no warning Lucy Mercer was discharged from the service “by special order of the Secretary of the Navy.” the ostensible reason was the illness and death of her father, but at least one Roosevelt biographer has opined that rumors of her affair with Franklin had reached Josephus Daniels’s ears. A deeply religious man, he did not consider adultery a mere peccadillo.

If Daniels or Eleanor thought the assistant secretary would be discouraged by threats or veiled rebukes, they soon discovered how wrong they were. The lovers continued to see each other in the Maryland or Virginia countryside, and wrote passionate letters celebrating their trysts.
⁷⁰

Other things were on the Roosevelts’ minds—and on the minds of many other Americans—in the summer and fall of 1917. “General Wood has been here,” Eleanor wrote a friend. “& F. has been fearfully depressed by what he tells. Hopeless incompetence seems to surround us in high places.” Leonard Wood was doing his utmost to repay Woodrow Wilson for refusing to appoint him commander of the AEF. He knew that Theodore Roosevelt’s cousin would be more than willing to listen to his horror stories about the Wilson war effort.
⁷¹

In May, the War Department abruptly transferred Wood from Governor’s Island, where he was in command of the Eastern Department and had access to dozens of reporters as well as Theodore Roosevelt. Sent to Charleston to command the Southeast Department, Wood told a friend: “I . . . shall set the South on fire.” He did exactly that. In Charleston, Atlanta and other Southern cities, he was welcomed with parades and speeches. Spotting a small Confederate flag in an old man’s hand, Wood said,“That is an honorable flag. Men have died for it.” thereafter he could do no wrong in Dixie.
⁷²

Wood toured the many new camps in the South and was dismayed by what he found.“Old broken-down colonels ” were in command, without a clue about how to train a new generation of officers.“Their lack of energy . . . acts like a brake on all progress.” wood saw the oldsters as another illustration of the War Department’s “dead cold hand of inefficiency.”

Everywhere, the general made speeches emphasizing “the little done, the undone vast,” an all-but-explicit criticism of the Wilson administration. In a July letter to TR, Wood wrote: “They are beginning to ask why isn’t something being done. They cannot be much longer fooled by throwing dust in the air and shouting ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’”
⁷³

Again, with no warning, the War Department transferred Wood to Kansas. This was a blunder. Wilson had said he was keeping Wood home the way the British had retained their biggest hero, Lord Kitchener, in England, to train troops. Southern papers fulminated at the president’s hypocrisy and accused him of mixing politics with the battlefield. A friend assured Wood,“You have got the East and South ablaze, and God knows what you will do with the Middle West.”
⁷⁴

In command of the new Eighty-Ninth Division at Camp Funston in Kansas, Wood told a friend on September 6, 1917,“Our men are coming in and we are without arms, without artillery and pretty much everything we need, including uniforms, and there is not much prospect of them in the near future.” He sardonically wondered how a nation “of our numerical and financial strength” could have watched a great war come nearer and nearer and now found itself, five months after war was declared, unable to equip the small number of troops called to the colors so far.

In a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, Wood said the situation in Washington reminded him of a neophyte driver pushing down on the clutch with one foot while the other one is on the accelerator.“The engine is whirling around and a tremendous noise is being made, but there is no application of power.”
⁷⁵

As summer ebbed and the icy winds of fall swept across the great plains, Wood became more alarmed than sardonic.“A thousand men slept cold last night, with only one blanket to a man,” he told his diary. There was also a “great shortage of hats.” Next he discovered that the wells on which the camp depended for drinking water were infected with
E. coli
bacteria. When it rained heavily, Camp Funston became a sea of mud, with many buildings entirely surrounded by water. As fog and general dampness seeped from the nearby Kaw River, Wood called the place a “death-trap for pneumonia.”
⁷⁶

If he had been given “a free hand” in April, Wood told Roosevelt, he could have had 600,000 men in France by the first of December. Now, the situation was “terrible beyond words.” He feared that we would “dribble” men into France and let the Germans beat them “in detail.”
⁷⁷

In France, things were not going much better in the disorganized American war effort. Almost everything that arrived from the United States for the AEF was defective. One-third of the bullets were duds. Gas masks were little more than sieves. In boxes marked men’s underwear, one quartermaster found infants’ night shirts. Trucks arrived without motors, wagons without wheels. Even worse was the deluge of totally unusable civilian items. A desperate Pershing cabled:“Recommend no further shipments be made of following articles . . . Book cases, bath tubs . . . chairs except folding chairs, cuspidors, office desks, floor wax, hose except fire hose, step ladders, lawn mowers, refrigerators, safes except iron field safes, settees, sickles, stools, window shades.”
⁷⁸