On the evening of June 4, 1941, in the family dining room on the second floor of the White House, the woman who controlled access to the President of the United States rose from a staff dining table, and her body failed her. She was 44 years old. She had worked for Franklin Delano Roosevelt for 21 years, longer than any of his cabinet members, longer than three of his five children were alive, when she entered his orbit.
She lived three floors above the Oval Office in a private suite that no one in the building was allowed to occupy except her family. The only door in the West Wing that opened directly into the president’s working office was the door from her office. Calls to the residence at night went to her first.
When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, she answered the phone before the president was awakened. She decided whether and how he should be awakened. The cocktail-tray session the president called “children’s hour” was under her control. She signed the bills he paid by check on his behalf, with a power of attorney. The man on whose lap his second son had once seen her sitting, according to his father’s account, was the man at whose dinner she was present when her speech began to fail her and her body collapsed to the floor.
The collapse on June 4th was the prelude. Two weeks later, around mid-June, came the severe stroke that left her partially paralyzed and with only limited speech, according to the Wikipedia summary, which is based on biographical literature about Roosevelt. The woman whom Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith described as warm and attractive with inky blue eyes, already graying black hair, and a captivating, husky voice—the woman whom FDR himself called his “conscience”—would never again work a day in the West Wing, never again lead children’s hour, never again answer the phone to tell them the president was on the line.
She had 8 months and 12 days less to live than he did. She didn’t know that on the evening she got up from dinner. Neither did he. The official summary of her position by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, written by its former director Paul M.
Sparrow identifies her with a sentence that is both modest and structurally accurate: “She was his personal secretary and closest confidante for more than 20 years.” A figure who, in Sparrow’s interpretation, was “the least remembered but most important of the women in Roosevelt’s circle.” This interpretation is that of the FDR Library itself, the institution that Missy LeHand personally helped to establish in 1941 and whose dedication ceremony on June 30 of that year she missed because she was confined to a hospital bed following a stroke.
Her absence at this inauguration is a documentary indictment in miniature. The building she had designed was opened without her. The position she held in Roosevelt’s White House is undisputed, even if the nature of her relationship with FDR remains contested. Kathryn Smith, in her 2016 biography, *The Gatekeeper, Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Story of the Partnership That Defined a Presidency*, describes her function in a single sentence, which has since become the standard abbreviation for her role.
“Missy was the Swiss Army knife of the White House, a formidable, multi-talented, multitasking marvel.” Smith’s claim that LeHand eventually served as White House Chief of Staff, the first woman in American history to do so, is structural, not romantic, and is supported by the documentary record of her duties: the morning bedside conference, reviewing the president’s mail, examining his phone calls, directing children’s hour, authorizing his accounts, recommending his first attorney general, supporting the nomination of Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court, introducing Tommy Corcoran to the New Deal drafting circle, and the constant rule that the president could not be woken after going to bed without her permission.
Samuel Rosenman, FDR’s own speechwriter, called her “one of the most important people of the Roosevelt era, a woman whose contributions will never be adequately understood except by those who knew her personally.”
Grace Tully, her assistant and the woman who eventually inherited her desk, called her “the queen of the White House staff.” The dinner on June 4, 1941, was superficially an ordinary White House staff dinner. It has survived in the documentary record in part because what was happening at the same time on FDR’s side of the building was significant.
According to the American Heritage report, Lucy Mercer Rutherford—Eleanor Roosevelt’s former social secretary, with whom FDR had an affair from 1916 to 1918, which Eleanor ended by threatening divorce—had tea with the president in the Oval Study, while Missy sat at the staff table on the second floor. Lucy had been writing under the pseudonym Mrs.
Paul Johnson returned to FDR’s life. Their visits were arranged by FDR’s daughter Anna and channeled through Mrs. Owen’s door to the rose garden, so that no entry appeared in the official visitor register. Geography is the indictment. [Music] In one room, the woman who had been with FDR for 21 years; in the other, the woman who had been with him for two and a half years a generation earlier and was now returning.
On the stairs between them lay the structural betrayal that the next three years would make clear. The collapse, as recorded by the FDR Library blog, likely resulted from a combination of stroke and heart attack. She was bedridden. Two weeks later came the severe stroke. The Wikipedia summary, based on biographical literature about Roosevelt, notes that she was “partially paralyzed with limited speech.”
Doris Kearns Goodwin later, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning story No Ordinary Time >> [Music] >> Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Home Front in World War II from 1994, attributed one of the triggering stressors of a certain repression to Crown Princess Märtha of Norway, the exiled royal who had taken up residence in the Washington area after Germany’s invasion of her country, had taken the seat next to him in car journeys that had long been LeHand’s seat.
Goodwin’s phrasing is that of a historian. “It was disturbing for Missy to be replaced by another woman.” Kathryn Smith adds, based on the Warm Springs medical records she discovered during her biographical research, that the rheumatic fever Missy contracted at age 15 had permanently damaged her heart and that her collapse in Warm Springs in 1927 was more physiological than psychological—a fact which, in Smith’s view, had for half a century wrongly characterized her as emotionally fragile.
The collapse on June 4, according to this interpretation, was the second of three medical events that spanned 30 years. The third would kill her. The man at whose dining table she collapsed paid every subsequent medical bill. Kathryn Smith documented in 2021 on the History News Network that FDR “brought in top-notch specialists from across the country and paid all the medical bills.”
Five months later, on November 12, 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor, he signed a will that left her half of his estate’s income for her lifelong medical care. This was the structural recognition. What he did not do between June 4, 1941, and the day of her death on July 31, 1944, was visit her at any of the places where she was eventually transferred.
Marguerite Alice LeHand was born on September 13, 1896, in Potsdam, New York, the youngest of four children of Daniel J. LeHand and Mary J. Graffin LeHand, children of Irish immigrants. The Wikipedia entry, based on Katherine Smith’s biography, notes the family’s unusual demographic structure. The parents had begun having children at the age of 16, with Marguerite arriving when they were both in their forties.
The family moved to Somerville, Massachusetts, a working-class suburb of Boston, when she was a young child. The address, 101 Orchard Street, would remain the family’s home for the rest of her life, including the 21 years she spent living elsewhere on behalf of the President and the 26 months she lay dying there.
At 15, she contracted rheumatic fever. The disease permanently damaged her heart and led to chronic atrial fibrillation, which doctors at the time treated with digitalis and which was mistakenly attributed to a nervous breakdown during an incident in Warm Springs in 1927. Eleanor Roosevelt later said the disease left Missy “delicate” and prevented her from doing “strenuous physical activity.”
In the Barnes & Noble Q&A for The Gatekeeper, Katherine Smith identifies the deeper consequence: Rheumatic fever “made motherhood unlikely and physical labor impractical, forcing Marguerite into a career as a secretary, where she could function on her own terms.” Smith’s discovery of the Warm Springs medical records from 1941 to 1942 was the breakthrough in her research.
“It was the first time I realized the devastating impact her rheumatic fever attack had had on her life,” Smith said. “When I saw that her collapse in 1927 was more physiological than psychological, I realized that she had been wrongly characterized as emotionally fragile. It turned everything that had been written about her upside down.”
She graduated from Somerville High School in 1917, where she had taken secretarial courses in preparation for a career, and never attended college. Her path from an Irish Catholic working-class neighborhood in a Boston suburb to the West Wing of Roosevelt’s White House involved passing the civil service exam and working as a clerk in the Naval Department in Washington, D.C., during World War I.
The Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the same building during the same period was Franklin D. Roosevelt. They did not meet. The narrow miss, recorded on the National Park Service’s biographical page, is a detail of timing, not significance. Their lives crossed in 1917 without intersecting. Three years would pass before the introduction took place under the auspices of another campaign.
In the summer of 1920, on the recommendation of FDR’s assistant at the Naval Department, Charles McCarthy, she was offered a position as secretary in the Cox-Roosevelt vice-presidential campaign. Paul M. Sparrow of the FDR Library notes that the campaign began in August 1920 with James M. Cox at the top of the ticket and FDR, at the age of 38, in second place.
And it was widely assumed that Cox would lose to the Republican candidate, Senator Warren Harding. The assumption proved correct. Cox-Roosevelt was decisively defeated in a landslide victory in November. The campaign ended, the offices closed, and the staff dispersed. Marguerite LeHand was 24 years old. The candidate’s wife, not the candidate himself, invited her to Hyde Park to help with correspondence.
This is the immediate fact of how Missy entered the Roosevelts’ orbit, and it is preserved verbatim in the FDR Library’s own institutional account. “After the election, Eleanor asked Missy to come to her home in Hyde Park and help finish the correspondence. She did such a good job that when FDR was hired as vice president for the Fidelity and Deposit Company, he asked her to become his full-time secretary.”
Eleanor’s role in this is structural and undisputed. The woman whom Missy would later treat, in Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biographical reading, “like an older daughter” or “like a younger wife in the manner of Asian matriarchs,” was the same woman who had initially recommended her to her husband. There was no initial deception.
Missy had been brought into the Roosevelt household by Eleanor herself. In January 1921, Marguerite LeHand began working as FDR’s private secretary at his Wall Street law firm and at his position with the Fidelity and Deposit Company. She was paid an office clerk’s wage. She slept on the sofa at a cousin’s house in the Bronx. The youngest Roosevelt children, who had difficulty with the formal “Miss LeHand,” shortened her name to Missy.
And the nickname spread from the family circle into political circles and eventually into the national press, where it would appear on the cover of Time magazine in December 1934. In her own private code, she called the candidate FD, the only person to use that name. Roosevelt biographer Jean Edward Smith later described her physical appearance in the years shortly before her arrival on the secretary’s sofa.
“Five feet seven inches tall, warm and attractive with inky blue eyes, already graying black hair, and an engaging, husky voice. She was also modest, well-mannered, exceptionally capable, and thoroughly organized.” Kathryn Smith adds the appropriate detail in The Gatekeeper: “Tall and slender with wavy dark brown hair and large blue eyes beneath dark, arched brows, the classic black Irish coloring.”
As early as 1921, as the New York Times obituary later noted, her black hair was already turning gray, a premature graying that her colleagues teased her about for the next two decades. For seven months in 1921, she was a Wall Street secretary, working for a seemingly up-and-coming Democratic politician under seemingly routine professional conditions.
On August 10, 1921, these conditions ended at the family’s retreat on Campobello Island in Canada. Franklin Roosevelt was 39 years old when polio paralyzed him from the waist down. From that day forward, his life and Missy LeHand’s life were structurally intertwined in ways no employer-secretary contract could ever have imagined. The arrangement, which would last until June 4, 1941, was about to begin.
In the years following his polio diagnosis, the man who in the summer of 1921 had been a robust Hudson Valley patrician became almost disabled, requiring the use of locked steel crutches, a cane, and the arm of a strong man, whose forearm sometimes bore finger-shaped bruises afterward. The article in American Heritage notes that walking required all of this for Roosevelt, that he could not rise from a chair on his own without assistance, and that he operated motor vehicles only with hand controls.
The physical reality of the disability, clearly documented, is a prerequisite for understanding everything that followed regarding Missy LeHand’s role. The role required constant physical proximity, and constant physical proximity to a paralyzed man required someone whose presence the household tolerated.
Eleanor Roosevelt and Louis McHenry Howe, FDR’s political strategist, formed two corners of the inner circle that managed FDR’s medical, political, and domestic life in the 1920s. Missy formed the third. According to Sparrow of the FDR Library, Missy was one of the few who were allowed to see him in his Manhattan apartment during this time.
And she, along with Eleanor and Howe, became one of the key figures who encouraged him to return to politics. In the summer of 1923, the first documentary trace of Missy’s integration into FDR’s private life outside the office appeared in an inconspicuous detail. She was vacationing with FDR and Howe at Howe’s cabin in Horse Neck Beach, Massachusetts, and “took care of the correspondence.”
The detail, recorded by Soundings Online, is the entry point into the houseboat era. In the winter of 1924, FDR and his friend John Lawrence bought an old houseboat, which they christened Larooco, a portmanteau of Lawrence, Roosevelt, and Co., and sailed it in the warm coastal waters of Florida. For three winters, 1924, 1925, and 1926, FDR lived aboard the Larooco, fishing, swimming, sunbathing, drinking, and working with the warmth on his legs in an attempt to regain functions that doctors in New York had told him would not return.
Missy LeHand was a constant presence on board. Eleanor visited the houseboat. “She didn’t like the carefree atmosphere,” Karen Chase summarized, and her visits were brief. The Larooco’s logbook, kept in FDR’s handwriting in a ring binder, contains an entry about fishing in Florida in April 1924. “In a few minutes I landed a nice kingfish, about 12 pounds.”
Then Missy LeHand landed a grouper. Next, a very large 7-pound snapper. Then we ended with two mackerel, another large grouper, another snapper, and two Spanish mackerel.” The voice is the recovery. The days include the small joys of the sun and the fishing line, and what’s in parentheses is the documentary track. She was there. She was named.
She held a fishing rod beside him. The only statistic that structures the Larooco period and the overlapping Warm Springs period comes from Conrad Black’s 2003 biography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom, on page 158. From 1925 to 1928, Roosevelt spent 116 out of 208 weeks away from home in an attempt to regain full use of his limbs.
Eleanor was with him for four of those weeks. Missy LeHand for 110. The Washington Post review in The Gatekeeper repeats the math with a slightly different phrasing: “Of the 116 weeks he spent away from home and family between 1924 and 1928, LeHand accompanied him for 110 weeks, while his mother and Eleanor were present for only a few.”
The exact wording varies. The arithmetic does not. During the years FDR spent relearning to walk, the woman who shared the work, the boat, the fishing rod, the correspondence, the attempt was Marguerite LeHand. The wife was elsewhere 4% of the time. Historians’ debate about what this proximity meant has produced the most disciplined sentences in Roosevelt literature.
Doris Kearns Goodwin distilled the emotional fact in *No Ordinary Time*. “Beneath all the complexity, it is perfectly clear that Franklin was the love of Missy’s life, and that he adored her and depended on her for affection, support, and work.” James Roosevelt, in his 1976 memoir, *My Parents, a Differing View*, written explicitly as a response to his brother Elliott’s earlier and more sensationalist book, gave the most frequently cited characterization by the family.
“I suppose one could say that they began to love each other, but it wasn’t physical love.” James’s argument was that his father’s polio had made bodily functions too difficult to sustain a physical affair. Elliott Roosevelt, in his 1973 book *An Untold Story, The Roosevelts of Hyde Park*, recalled seeing Missy on his father’s lap and claimed that she shared “an intimate life in all its aspects with her father,” claims from which four of his siblings publicly distanced themselves in *The New York Times* on March 16, 1973.
Hazel Rowley wrote that there was “no doubt that Franklin’s relationship with Missy was romantic,” but noted the disability issue. Kathryn Smith’s judgment in The Gatekeeper is the disciplined one: “There is not a single written account of anyone seeing her in a compromising position, despite the hundreds of Secret Service agents, associates, political cronies, family members, and friends who trampled through FDR’s bedroom during their 21 years together.”
Paul Sparrow of the FDR Library himself concludes that there is “no evidence to support speculation about an affair,” but that their time aboard the Larooco laid the foundation for a deep bond that lasted until Missy’s death. What historians agree on, despite their disagreement, is the structural fact. From 1924 to 1928, winters on a houseboat off the coast of Florida and summers on a hill in Georgia called Warm Springs, Marguerite LeHand was Franklin Roosevelt’s daily companion during his recovery.
Whatever the bedroom door concealed, or didn’t, the hours of the day belonged to her. FDR was elected governor of New York in November 1928, against Missy’s documented opposition. Her two-word objection, recorded by Katherine Smith in *The Gatekeeper*, was: “Don’t you dare.” She believed the campaign would interrupt the Warm Springs therapy and end his last serious chance of ever walking again.
She was outvoted. From January 1929, she lived in the Governor’s Palace in Albany, on the second floor, in a bedroom that Eleanor had personally offered her. Reporters covering the new governor began to refer to her as his “right hand.” She told an interviewer years later, “Albany was the hardest job I ever did.”
On election day in November 1932, Eleanor and Missy stood side by side on the steps of Hyde Park City Hall as the results came in, their gloved fingers intertwined. In a photograph described in the American Heritage article, Missy beamed, “while Eleanor, dreading becoming First Lady, looked dejected.” On March 4, 1933, FDR was sworn in as President of the United States, and Marguerite LeHand moved into a private suite on the third floor of the White House, the only person outside the family to reside permanently in the family quarters of the Executive Mansion during the Roosevelt years.
The geography of her position in the West Wing was unique in the building’s history. The 1934 renovation of the White House gave her an office overlooking the Rose Garden and a door that opened directly into the new Oval Office, the only office in the building with such a door.
A second door led from her office out into the garden, and through this second door entered the unannounced visitors whose names were not recorded in the official White House register. Lucy Mercer Rutherford, when she returned to FDR’s life under the pseudonym Mrs. Paul Johnson, entered the President’s day through Mrs. Johnson’s office.
Missy began her own day around 9:25 a.m., according to the Politico report, when she drank coffee and orange juice in her third-floor suite, skimmed several newspapers, and went to the president’s bedroom to begin the morning conference at his bedside, the only woman in the room. She was the public face of the inner West Wing in Look magazine’s multi-page 1940 photo essay, with her third-floor apartment and the president’s private study both open to the camera.
She was on the cover of Time in December 1934. In August 1933, when the Roosevelt administration was five months old, Newsweek had dubbed her the president’s “super-secretary.” The 1938 profile in the Saturday Evening Post focused on the two-word phrase that summed up her position in the building: “Missy knows it.” She was the only female member of the four-person West Wing Secretariat.
The other three, Louis McHenry Howe, Steve Early, and Marvin H. McIntyre, were men, and each earned twice her salary, a discrepancy the Wikipedia entry attributes to their gender. When Louis Howe died in April 1936, the Wikipedia entry, based on Katherine Smith and the National Park Service, notes that Missy effectively became the de facto White House Chief of Staff, the first woman in American history to serve in that role.
Drew Pearson, the Washington columnist, wrote that she thought of the plebeians, a Boston Catholic working-class counterweight to the Hudson Valley patriciate she served. >> [Music] >> FDR herself summed up her role in a single sentence, quoted in American Heritage and the Barnes & Noble edition of The Gatekeeper: “Missy is my conscience.”
The functional tasks accumulated in a pattern that no formal job description had provided for. She reviewed the president’s correspondence. She filtered his telephone calls and selected from his old contacts the small number who could be put through directly to him, including, in the late 1930s, Lucy Mercer Rutherford.
She advised on personnel matters. She recommended Homer S. Cummings for Attorney General after the original nominee died. She championed the appointment of Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court. She introduced FDR Tommy Corcoran, who would draft key legislation for the New Deal. She had power of attorney over FDR’s accounts and paid his bills, including, according to Politico, a check to Franklin Jr.’s doctor.
She accompanied FDR on weekend cruises aboard the presidential yachts Sequoia and Potomac. She led FDR’s daily cocktail ritual, which the family called “kids’ hour,” in which the president himself mixed martinis for the inner circle while Eleanor, who disapproved of alcohol, stayed away. She acted as hostess at formal dinners when Eleanor was traveling.
The permanent rule of the residence, as recorded on Wikipedia, was that once the president had gone to bed at night, he was not to be woken without LeHand’s permission. On the night of September 1, 1939, when news arrived by telephone that Hitler had invaded Poland, the call first reached Missy. She decided when and how the president should be woken.
World War II, by American time, began on her telephone. Historians have placed her in this position through various attributions. Joseph Persico, in his 2008 book Franklin and Lucy, called her “FDR’s surrogate wife.” And the publisher’s description of the book identifies her as “the woman who completed the world he lived in.”
John Edward Smith, in his 2007 FDR, organized the president’s emotional life around four women: Sara Roosevelt, Eleanor and Lucy Mercer, and Missy LeHand, FDR’s longtime secretary, companion, and confidante, whose admiration for her boss was “virtually boundless.” Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt’s biographer, characterized the First Lady’s accommodating attitude toward Missy as treating her “like an older daughter” or “like an Asian matriarch, like the younger wife.”
Eleanor herself wrote in a later book about occasionally being unable to “meet the need of someone I love very much,” and advised: “One must learn to allow another to satisfy the need without bitterness or envy, and to accept it [music].” Cook reads the passage as a veiled reference to Mrs. Roosevelt and Eleanor’s acceptance of it.
By December 1934, when Missy appeared on the cover of Time, the arrangement, which would last another seven years, had stabilized into something that the household, the staff, and the press all recognized, but that no one dared to speak aloud. In the months between Missy’s stroke in June 1941 and Pearl Harbor, two things happened in FDR’s life that defined the new arithmetic of her absence.
The first was that he ceased seeing her in any meaningful way, even though she was still in the same building for part of this time. The second was that he very quietly revised his last will and testament. The legal document was signed on November 12, 1941. The signature has survived in the will’s own concluding language, reproduced in the online text of the document held by the McCarthy law firm.
“In witness whereof I have here set my hand and seal, and hereby initialed each of the preceding 19 pages, on this 12th day of November 1941.” Sara Delano Roosevelt, FDR’s mother, had died on September 7, 1941, making FDR’s estate entirely his to distribute. The Presidential History Blog records the timing precisely. Very discreetly, shortly after her stroke and the prognosis that any recovery would be long, arduous, and not guaranteed, FDR revised his will.
The instrument was signed approximately five months after the collapse and three weeks before Pearl Harbor. It was to be inaugurated four years later, on April 16, 1945, in the office of Frederick S. Quintero, Surrogate of Dutchess County, four days after the President’s death in Warm Springs. The relevant clause, Article 8, Section B, is unambiguous.
The capital of FDR’s remaining estate was to be divided among his five children, Anna, James, Elliott, Franklin Jr., and John. The income was divided differently. Half of the trust’s net income was to be paid to Eleanor Roosevelt for life. The remaining half was to be paid according to the exact wording of the will: “to or for the account of my friend Marguerite A.”
LeHand, in such sums, at such times, and in such manner as my trustees, in their sole discretion, deem necessary and appropriate to cover expenses incurred or to be incurred by or on behalf of the said Marguerite A. LeHand for medical care, nursing, and treatment during her lifetime.” In addition, up to $1,000 per year was authorized for the maintenance and living expenses of the said Marguerite A.
LeHand. The estate was eventually valued at more than $3 million. A modern estimate puts her current income at more than $3 million per year. Half of that, according to the 1941 plan, was to belong to her for the rest of her life, for the sole purpose of keeping her medically cared for. The legal wording is a gift from the historian.
The will does not call her “my secretary.” It does not call her “my employee.” It does not name her in relation to any official function she held at the Albany mansion or in the West Wing. It calls her “my friend Marguerite A. LeHand.” Roosevelt biographer Conrad Black, whose 2003 book, *Champion of Freedom*, includes the calculation of 110 out of 208 weeks, treats the will as the public gratification of a 21-year-old private fact.
The Presidential History Blog summarizes the structural significance: “The income, today more than $3 million a year, was divided equally between his wife Eleanor and his devoted friend Marguerite LeHand to ensure she always received the best possible medical care.” No American president before FDR had ever publicly stipulated in a legal document submitted to a probate court that half of his estate’s income should be set aside for the lifelong medical care of a female friend who was neither related to him nor married to him.
The codicil, or, within the context of the will itself, the revised testamentary instrument, was filed with the public record on April 17, 1945, when The New York Times reported on its provisions. What FDR told his eldest son, James, about the decision has been preserved in The Gatekeeper and is repeated in the HistoryNet book review: “It has served me so well for so long and asked for so little in return.”
A slightly more elaborate version reads: “I owed her so much. She served me so well for so long and asked for so little in return.” James Roosevelt, in his 1976 book “My Parents: A Differing View,” had already provided the family’s most frequently quoted summary of his father’s relationship with the woman he had named in his will. “I suppose one could say that they began to love each other, but it was not physical love.”
The legal document and the family memoirs, written by the same son who conveyed news of his wife’s dire needs to his father, describe two facets of the same recognition. The first, in the language of the trustees, was the allocation of half the income from an estate for medical care during her lifetime.
The second, in the family’s language, was love, which had taken a form reshaped by polio. The provision had a single condition built into its operation: it would only take effect if she were still alive at the time of the president’s death. The testator did not consider, and could not consider, that the woman whose health he had protected with his medical bills since June 1941 might die before him.
She was 45 when he signed the document. He was 59. The actuarial expectation was clear. In November 1941, the probability of the order of deaths being reversed was so small that it wasn’t accounted for by any contingencies in the document. It would, in fact, be reversed. When the will was read at 4:30 p.m. on April 16, 1945, in Judge Quintero’s chambers in Poughkeepsie.
On April 16, 1945, the New York Times reported the legal impact in a single sentence: “The provision for the care of Marguerite LeHand was rendered invalid due to her death on July 31.” The phrase “my friend Marguerite A. LeHand” remained in the document. Its legal weight remained zero. The phrase had outlived the woman for whom it was written by 259 days.
Between June 1941 and her death in July 1944, the woman whom the president had called his conscience saw the President of the United States only sporadically, and with increasing frequency, and after May 15, 1942, she never saw him again. This chronology is recorded in several sources, none of which are disputed regarding the central fact.
Following a severe stroke in mid-June 1941, she was hospitalized at Doctors Hospital in Washington, D.C. From the hospital, she was transferred to Warm Springs, Georgia, to receive the rehabilitation that FDR herself had relied on 20 years earlier. The FDR Presidential Library was dedicated in Hyde Park on June 30, 1941.
She had helped establish the institution. She wasn’t there. On December 7, 1941, the day of Pearl Harbor, she was in Warm Springs, calling the White House. Grace Tully, her former assistant, who had succeeded her at the desk in the West Wing, took the message for the president. The FDR Library blog documents the outcome in a single sentence.
FDR did not call her back that day. During the Christmas season of 1941 in Warm Springs, several sources report that she was very unhappy and may have attempted to harm herself by eating chicken bones. In March 1942, she returned to her apartment on the third floor of the White House. She was, according to the sources, a shadow of her former self.
FDR visited her briefly. The children’s program leaders kept her company. After she accidentally set her bed on fire while lighting a cigarette, the household decided to send her home. On May 15, 1942, she left Washington. The Wikipedia entry, based on Kathryn Smith, summarizes the key fact in eight words.
“After Missy left the White House, she never saw FDR again.” The Politico report, the National Park Service biographical page, and the FDR Library all confirm the same fact. From May 15, 1942, until her death on July 31, 1944—a period of 2 years, 2 months, and 16 days—Marguerite LeHand and Franklin Roosevelt were never in the same room.
What he did, however, as Katherine Smith documents in History News Network, was “to call and write from time to time, to send generous gifts such as an engraved silver love cup for her birthday, and to continue paying her medical bills.” He did not visit Somerville. He did not visit Warm Springs while she was there. The Pacific voyage he took during the 1944 election campaign, the voyage on which he was at sea when she died, was the geographical alibi for his absence on the day of her funeral.
However, her structural absence preceded the Pacific trip by more than two years. She lived in Somerville with her sister Anna Rochon and two nieces in the family home at 101 Orchard Street. She was partially paralyzed and could barely speak. In her final months, she was no longer able to write normally.
The most poignant document contained in her papers, preserved in the Grace Tully archive, which was finally transferred to the FDR Library in 2010, is a note she scribbled to Tully on July 16, 1944, 15 days before her death. The article in the National Archives Prologue describes its contents: “Although severely weakened and dying from the stroke that had first struck her down in 1941, LeHand nevertheless retained a deep interest in FDR and the political game she so sorely missed.”
From her recovery in Massachusetts, Missy scribbled a short note to Grace, posing the question on every American’s mind that summer: “Who will get the vice-presidential nomination? I’m beside myself with worry.” The answer, when she died, was Harry S. Truman. She didn’t live to find out.
She died on July 31, 1944, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Suffolk County, where she had presumably been hospitalized after suffering a second stroke. She was 47 years old. Find a Grave lists Chelsea as her place of death. The family home in Somerville was where she had been living. FDR was on a military tour in the Pacific when the news reached the White House.
Some accounts circulating among those who knew her, and described in the Churchill Book Collector summary as unconfirmed but poignant, suggested that the second stroke was triggered by her seeing FDR’s gaunt appearance in a cinema newsreel. The funeral took place on August 2, 1944, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, officiated by Bishop Richard Cushing of Boston, the future cardinal.
Among the mourners were Eleanor Roosevelt, Chief Justice Felix Frankfurter, whom Missy had helped get to the court, former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, and about 1,200 others. Eleanor was present. FDR was not. He sent the President’s formal statement. “The memory of more than 20 years of dedicated service magnifies the sense of personal loss brought about by the passing of Miss LeHand.”
“Loyal and conscientious, with a charming manner, inspired by tact and kindness, she was completely selfless in fulfilling her duties. She possessed a quiet efficiency that made her a true genius at getting things done. Her memory will be cherished and appreciated not only by all members of our family, but also by the large circle of those whose duties brought them into contact with her.”
The phrase “She was completely selfless in the performance of her duties” was inscribed on her gravestone. She was buried in the Lahan family plot, plot 7136, at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Central Avenue. The Roosevelt family continues to pay for the upkeep of the grave, according to the Politico report, which is based on research by Katherine Smith.
FDR paid for the gravestone. The inscription was his statement about her fulfillment of duty. The signature on the testamentary instrument, which was then less than three years old, would become a clause without subject matter in eight months. On August 1, 1944, the day after Missy’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt published her syndicated column, “My Day.” The text is preserved verbatim in the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University.
“This morning we received some very sad news,” Eleanor wrote. “Miss Marguerite LeHand, who for so many years was my husband’s devoted private secretary, passed away last night completely unexpectedly. I am sure that death will be a release for her after her long illness. But those who loved her, especially her nieces who lived with her, will feel her loss deeply.”
“She was a member of our family for many years and rendered the President a service that is never paid for, for which he and everyone around him were always extremely grateful.” The sentence that has stuck in historians’ minds is the seven-word clause in the middle of the paragraph: “She was a member of our family for many years.”
The wife had given the secretary the family title, which no will, contract, or table of contents had ever made official. The column was published the day before the funeral, which Eleanor would attend in Cambridge. Historians of the Roosevelt marriage have placed Eleanor’s tribute in a broader context. John Edward Smith wrote in FDR that Eleanor and Franklin were headstrong individuals who cared deeply about each other’s happiness but recognized their own inability to provide it.
Smith adds, in a passage preserved on Wikipedia: “Remarkably, both ER and Franklin recognized, accepted, and encouraged this arrangement.” Blanche Wiesen Cook, in her Eleanor Roosevelt biography, treated the First Lady’s attitude toward Missy as an established agreement, “the elder daughter or the younger wife,” while also pointing out that Eleanor had her own intimate confidante in journalist Lorena Hickok, with whom she exchanged more than 3,500 letters over 30 years.
The Roosevelt arrangement was reciprocal, according to the historian. Eleanor’s tribute on August 1, 1944, was not the gracious gesture of a wife removing a rival. It was, in the literally published sentence, the family’s recognition, which Cook, Smith, and Goodwin had documented over decades. FDR himself died 8 months and 12 days after Missy.
The date was April 12, 1945, at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, the place where Missy had been his hostess since 1924. He was 63 years old. He was posing for portrait painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. The woman in the room with the painter was Lucy Mercer Rutherford.
Eleanor was not present, nor were any of the children. Lucy left before Eleanor arrived. Information of Lucy’s presence reached Eleanor afterward and, according to the National Park Service report, “furious” her. The arrangement of FDR’s final hours followed the same pattern that had characterized his afternoons on June 4, 1941.
The woman from the affair long ago in the room, the woman with 21 years of service in another state. The pattern outlasted the end of the earlier relationship by 22 months. Four days later, on April 16, 1945, at 4:30 p.m., FDR’s will was filed by attorney Henry T. Hackett with Probate Judge Quintero in Poughkeepsie. The witnesses identified in the document were Grace Tully, Thomas J.
Qualters of the Secret Service and William F. Snyder. The New York Times of April 17, 1945, reported on the legal effect of the provision for Marguerite LeHand. “The provision for the care of Marguerite LeHand, who served as Mr. Roosevelt’s private secretary, became void due to her death on July 31.” The half-share of income reverted entirely to Eleanor.
The capital would be divided among the five children after Eleanor’s death. The phrase “My friend Marguerite A. LeHand” remained in the document, a clause of the will without legal force. The documents that Missy had not kept—because she had refused to keep a diary in every interview of her career, and the article she once attempted to write about her work was abandoned and never published—
They passed to Grace Tully, who took them with her when she left the White House in 1945. They remained in Tully’s possession, though Tully denied ownership to Eleanor Roosevelt until her death decades later. The Grace Tully Archive arrived at the FDR Library in 2010, 66 years after the death of the woman who had created most of the documents it contains.
Kathryn Smith’s *The Gatekeeper*, the first dedicated biography, followed in 2016. Joseph Persico’s use of the phrase “substitute wife” in *Franklin and Lucy* had appeared in 2008. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s *Franklin Was the Love of Missy’s Life* had been around since 1994. Geoffrey C. Ward’s *A First-Class Temperament* had taken the relationship seriously since 1989.
Conrad Black’s “116 out of 208” statistic was published in 2003. The Ken Burns documentary brought it to a national audience in 2014. The historical record, finally completed with the transfer of the Tully archive in 2010, had reconstructed a memory that had been almost entirely obscured by the lack of documentation.
Robert Sherwood, the playwright whom FDR had brought to the West Wing, had dedicated a copy of “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” to her, with a sentence that read like a courtesy in 1939 and sounds today like a long-postponed promise: “For Missy LeHand, who will one day play a vital role in a play about the greatest president of the United States since the main character of this play.”
Sherwood died before he wrote it. The play now exists in the histories of Smith, Goodwin, Persico, Ward, Cook, Black, and Jean Edward Smith, who individually and collectively did the work he predicted someone would eventually do. The Somerville Public Library named its children’s section after her in 1976, on her 80th birthday.
Tip O’Neill, who as a student had once been brought to the White House to meet the President at her invitation, attended the ceremony. She is buried in Cambridge beneath FDR’s own sentence about her duty. The man who wrote the sentence is buried in Hyde Park in the rose garden behind the family home, next to Eleanor.
The will, signed by the president in November 1941, stipulated that half of the income from the Hyde Park estate would be used for the lifelong medical care of his friend, Marguerite A. LeHand. She died 259 days earlier. By April 1945, the estate had no further obligations to her. The clause remained in place. It had served no purpose.
