What Happened to Roosevelt’s Mistress After He Died?

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[00:00:00]The smell of fresh paint in a rented cottage in Georgia.

[00:00:03]>> [music] >> The sound of a brush moving across canvas then stopping. The signature on a letter marked personal and private written on black-bordered widow's stationery >> [music] >> referring to the president of the United States only as the B.

[00:00:18]Three authorities made predictions about what would happen when Franklin Roosevelt died. The White House communications machinery calculated that the official narrative would hold. The devoted wife, the wartime partner, Eleanor beside [music] him at the end.

[00:00:34]She was at a tea in Washington when she was called. Roosevelt's political architects had calculated in 1918 that ending the affair would seal the record permanently. A promise was made.

[00:00:47]Letters were [music] surrendered. The woman was removed from the household.

[00:00:51]The affair continued for 27 more years, and the archivists who processed FDR's papers after his death concluded that the private correspondence had been destroyed. That silence [music] had been chosen and would hold. It held for 21 years.

[00:01:07]Then a collection of 5,000 documents kept in private hands for six decades [music] nearly went to auction. A special act of Congress was required to bring them into the National Archives.

[00:01:20]Among those pages was a letter on black-bordered widow's stationery arranging a secret visit to Warm Springs, [music] Georgia.

[00:01:29]The writer never used Roosevelt's name.

[00:01:32]She called him the subject, once the B, shorthand for boss.

[00:01:38]The writer was Lucy Mercer Rutherford.

[00:01:41]By the time that letter entered the public record, Lucy had been dead for 62 years.

[00:01:47]Eleanor Roosevelt hired her in 1914, social secretary, three mornings a week.

[00:01:54]Lucy Page Mercer was 23 from a Washington family that had lost its fortune in the panic of 1893.

[00:02:02]What remained was social fluency and a quality that multiple Roosevelt family members later described independently in nearly identical terms. She made people feel entirely at ease.

[00:02:16]Franklin noticed in 1916 while Eleanor and the children were at Campobello. He arranged [music] yachting parties on the Potomac, dinners she attended and Eleanor did not.

[00:02:27]In 1917, Lucy left Eleanor's employment.

[00:02:31]The record uses the words [music] quit or was fired without resolving which and enlisted in the Navy.

[00:02:39]Franklin was assistant secretary of the Navy.

[00:02:43]Lucy was assigned to his office.

[00:02:46]In September of 1918, Franklin returned from Europe sick with pneumonia. Sailors [music] carried him off the ship.

[00:02:54]Eleanor unpacked his luggage. Inside, wrapped in velvet ribbon, she found a packet of perfumed letters from Lucy.

[00:03:02]She offered a divorce. Franklin's mother, Sarah, threatened to cut off his inheritance. Political adviser, Louis Howe, said divorce would end the career before it truly began.

[00:03:13]Lucy's Catholic faith prohibited marriage to a divorced man regardless.

[00:03:18]Franklin chose the career. [music] He promised Eleanor he would never see Lucy again. He invited Lucy to his first inauguration in 1933.

[00:03:27]Car arranged through White House logistics, Eleanor not informed. [music] She attended all four inaugurations under similar arrangements.

[00:03:37]In 1920, Lucy married Winthrop Rutherford, a wealthy New York widower, 16 years her senior, six children.

[00:03:45]She became stepmother, estate manager, and disappeared from the public record entirely.

[00:03:51]The correspondence with Franklin continued through private channels across the 1920s and 30s.

[00:03:59]Winthrop Rutherford died in the spring of 1944.

[00:04:03]Within months, the visits resumed. This time arranged by Anna Roosevelt, Franklin's eldest daughter, who managed her father's personal schedule as his health declined visibly.

[00:04:18]Anna later said Franklin was a sick and exhausted man who needed companionship and that Lucy provided something Eleanor, by her own admission, could not.

[00:04:29]Eleanor knew nothing. Not the White House meetings, not the drives, not the trips to Warm Springs. The portrait session was Lucy's idea. She had commissioned Elizabeth Shoumatoff, a Russian-born painter, to travel to Warm Springs and begin a formal portrait of Franklin, a private commission for herself.

[00:04:49]On the morning of April 12th, 1945, Roosevelt sat in a leather armchair in the Little White House living room.

[00:04:58]Shoumatoff was at her easel.

[00:05:00]Lucy was seated nearby.

[00:05:03]Franklin's cousin, Laura Delano, was also present.

[00:05:07]At 12:40 in the afternoon, Roosevelt raised his left hand to his temple. He said, "I have a terrific headache."

[00:05:14]He lost consciousness before anyone reached him.

[00:05:17]>> [music] >> The medical response was immediate. So was the political one.

[00:05:22]The Secret Service and household staff understood within minutes that the president was dying and that the woman in the room was not his wife, not a family member, not anyone who could appear in the official account of this moment. Lucy Mercer Rutherford left Warm Springs before Eleanor's plane landed.

[00:05:41]It was Laura Delano who disclosed the truth.

[00:05:45]Not to the press, but to Eleanor, in the days following the funeral.

[00:05:50]She told her Lucy had been present when Franklin died and that Anna had been arranging visits for over a year.

[00:05:58]The rupture between Eleanor and her daughter lasted years.

[00:06:04]Lucy drove south to her estate in Aiken, South Carolina. She gave no interviews.

[00:06:10]She issued no statement. In the weeks following, she destroyed Franklin's letters to her. 30 years of correspondence across depression and mobilization and D-Day and Yalta burned.

[00:06:23]What the FDR Presidential Library now holds are four letters from 1926 to 1928 found not in Lucy's papers, but in donated family documents decades later.

[00:06:36]Eleanor sent Lucy a small painting of Franklin after the funeral. Lucy responded with a letter. She wrote that Franklin had spoken of Eleanor constantly at the end, of her courage, her work, the things she had built.

[00:06:50]She said she had loved him and hoped Eleanor understood the nature of that love.

[00:06:55]Eleanor received the letter. She read it. She never replied.

[00:07:00]She spent the next 17 years building the work that made Harry Truman call her the first lady of the world. She did not mention Lucy Mercer Rutherford publicly again.

[00:07:12]Lucy died on July 31st, 1948.

[00:07:16]Leukemia. She was 57 years old, buried at Tranquility Cemetery in Tranquility, New Jersey. Her New York Times obituary was 62 words. It did not mention Franklin Roosevelt.

[00:07:30]The silence held through the 1940s and 1950s.

[00:07:35]It fractured in 1966 when Jonathan Daniels, a former Roosevelt aide, published a book naming Lucy directly [music] and describing the affair as 30 years long.

[00:07:46]The Roosevelt family disputed details.

[00:07:50]Elliott Roosevelt later confirmed the core account.

[00:07:53]The deeper archive remained closed for another 44 years. Grace Tully, FDR's personal secretary, had taken 5,000 pages of documents when she left the White House on April 12th.

[00:08:06]The collection sat in private hands for six and a half decades.

[00:08:11]In 2010, [music] it nearly went to auction.

[00:08:15]Federal legislation co-sponsored by Senators Schumer and Slaughter was required to transfer it to the National Archives.

[00:08:23]Among those 5,000 pages, the letter on black-bordered widow's stationery marked personal and private, arranging the final visit to Warm Springs. Lucy never wrote Roosevelt's name in it. Her love letters had cost her once before in 1918.

[00:08:39]She did not make that mistake again.

[00:08:42]The unfinished portrait still exists.

[00:08:45]Shoumatoff stopped painting the moment Roosevelt collapsed. The canvas, commissioned by Lucy, capturing Franklin in the final hour of his life, is now displayed at the Little White House Museum in Warm Springs.

[00:08:59]The brushwork stops mid-composition.

[00:09:02]The left side of the background was never finished.

[00:09:06]Lucy Mercer Rutherford was Roosevelt's private constant across three decades of American crisis.

[00:09:12]She held none of the titles. She appeared in none of the official photographs.

[00:09:17]She was in the room when he died and removed before his wife arrived.

[00:09:23]She destroyed the evidence, died 3 years later, and received 62 words that omitted his name.

[00:09:30]The official record presented Eleanor beside him at the end.

[00:09:34]The The record, recovered through a secretary's files, a near auction, and an act of Congress, confirmed there was another woman in that room. That she drove south through Georgia and never spoke about it publicly.

[00:09:49]That she burned what could have made her famous and died in a town called Tranquility.

[00:09:54]Historians still argue about what existed between them after 1918.

[00:09:59]The destroyed correspondence guarantees that argument will never fully close.

[00:10:05]That was most likely exactly what Lucy intended.

[00:10:10]Power removed her from the room before Eleanor's plane landed. The archive put her back.