[inaudible conversations] welcome to the museum and our 14th annual roosevelt reading festival. We are excited that you are here today. This program is a very special one i will tell you about in just a moment then there will be a book signing we are lucky enough to have cspan with us today so if you are going to ask questions we would ask that you use a microphone on the other side. These are made possible because of the support of the trustees and members and we have a trustee here today. Thank you very much for your support. [applause] your support makes these programs possible and we appreciate it. If you are not a member this gives you free admission and we hope that you will visit. We will not be hearing from an author we will be hearing from a principle. This is a fantastic book was written called the gatekeeper by Katherine Smith who did an enormous ounce of research about some of the least understood the players in the roosevelt legacy. I want you to take a deep breath and close your eyes and we are going to transport you back to june 17, 1933. Im going to introduce you to a woman that was the most powerful than Eleanor Roosevelt in washington during this period. She had known her she knew Franklin Roosevelt when he first ran for Vice President and have been with him through his polio recovery and when he was governor of new york and arrived in washington, d. C. In march of 33 she was technically the secretary that was almost a de facto chief of staff. If you wanted to see the president , you had to see missy this is a very sexist time in washington and it was difficult for women to be acknowledged in the role the roles they played. Eleanor was breaking bounds by her exercise of her role as the first lady and what it meant to be a first lady and missy redefined what it meant to be the president s assistant. So please come a warm welcome. [applause] thank you for that warm greeting. You may know that the president has on his way up for vacation and i will be joining him there with some of the other staff in the white house family. Its the first time hes been there since he was stricken with polio in 1920. It ended yesterday on june 16, and bought a 100 days i dont think there will be another one like it. [applause] this is an audience full of democrats. [laughter] i heard there were not that many in duchess county. [laughter] at any rate, it makes your head spin. The Banking System was saved, unemployment problems were addressed but they are going to get better. Sometimes he will say im the president of the United States and sometimes he will say i am a tree farmer from duchess county. So i think that he prefers to feed the tree farmer to be honest about one of the things he thought of is to create a tree army and the civilian conservation corps. And to create parks it is going to be a truly wonderful thing. And this is another very important thing the president spearheaded which is to make it legal to drink beer and wine again since the First Time Since 1920. Some of us of course never stopped. [laughter] but anyway, let me tell you just a little bit about me and how i came to work for mr. Roosevelt. I am Irish Catholic born in upstate new york and my grandparent came over on the ship during the famine into so many people died on the way to the ships. They had a baby and my grandfather was working. My great grandfather was working on a Church Building in a hatchet fell on his head and killed him, so my poor greatgrandmother never remarried and thats why my father was that very unusual creature and only child in the Irish Catholic family. [laughter] but i am the youngest of four children. I was born in pots and i gave away my age, 1896 and when i was a small child we moved to somerville which is the city within the city of boston, and that is where i grew up. I went to the Public Schools there and my education was going well until i was diagnosed with a fever and i spent about two years in bed recovering so i didnt finish high school until 1917 when our country and heard the great war. I was feeling very patriotic so i took the Civil Service exam as i have studied secretarial science and i was sent to washington to work at the department of the navy. And i never asked that charismatic young assistant secretarsecretary of the navy fn Delano Roosevelt at the time. In fact my career at the navy was rather checkered. I was in this area of top secrecy and was given squiggles of stenography and i have to type it out but then they gave me another sheep that had nothinsheet that hadnothing to e before and so on and i was so tired and i didnt know what ii had done so my roommate felt the same way so one day we decided we would play hooky and we went to mount vernon and had a marvelous time until we got home and there at the boarding house waiting for us was a nurse from the department of the navy and she said you dont look sick to me so we were both sentenced toa doctor and my roommate was not sick but she detected by a murmur and said you need a job that is not so stressful, so i went home to boston. I got a letter from a man named charles from one franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and needed some help at the Campaign Office so i went up to manhattan and worked there. I didnt see a lot of mr. Roosevelt because he was on trains going ove all over the country speaking on behalf of the president ial nominee. It wasnt a good year for a democrat of any kind and they were destroyed by the republican ticket of warren g. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Most historians would say maybe one of the worst. I think the only reason he wasnt the very worst is because he died in office and he was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge better known as simon cowell. You could recognize in the furniture in the oval office that he moved. There was a woman sitting next to him at a dinner party and she said i have a bet with my girlfriend i can get you to save more than two words. He looked at her and said you lose. [laughter] but knowing that it would be a while before we got them in the white house again mr. Roosevelt decided to work on wall street and needed a good private secretary so they asked me to come and work for him. Before long everyone did. I find this works pretty boring myself. There will be lots of other things. And he was involved in all sorts of calls such as the foundation and i went up to manhattan and stayed with the cousin and enjoyed very much. And there he was stricken with polio perhaps better known as infantile paralysis or just the infantile which is terrible for a man that is 39 and six to. Mr. Roosevelt tried everything he could to be able to walk again. When he heard about a young man at the tiny town in warm springs georgia who had exercised with polio and was able to walk with just a cane and i was mr. Roosevelts greatest desire because they are a medical device that the cane can be a fashion accessory. So we went down to warm springs and i must say it was a bit of a shock because we had to spend time in the rural sout south be. Mr. Roosevelt got right into the pool and loved it and said he could feel his toes move for the first time in three years and soon she could walk about with water up to his chest. Mrs. Roosevelt, not so much. She was horrified to learn you had to buy the chickens on the host. We bought them back to the cook and they were squatting in the yard and a coke strangled them right in front of mrs. Roosevelt dies. Suppose he wants steak for dinner tonight. [laughter] whatever shall i do. Okay i made that part up. [laughter] she didnt say the part about the state. But you know what he says never let the truth get in the way of a good story. But mrs. Roosevelt got back on the train. Shes a very busy lady even then with all of her costs and interest. Well, the word got out that such a famous man and polio survivor was hoping to swim his way to health and others were coming and mr. Roosevelt bought the place and turned it into the a e rehabilitation facility which is today still and in 1928, he was convinced to run for the governor of new york and he won by a whisker and we spent four years there and albany in the Governors Mansion where i lived with a roosevelt and we began the practice which continues to this day of myself being the backup was this to mrs. Roosevelt so she could continue to be his eyes and ea ears. [laughter] we went to the white house taking this up in 1933. Some dreadful things have happened before then, the most serious of which was the banking crisis all over the country they were failing and taking the life savings of america. Mr. Roosevelt and his advisers were going to try to use an old world war ii piece of banking legislation to close down the banks temporarily and reorganized them and it would require an opinion for the new attorney general. Unfortunately, the man that he decided to appoint was coming to the inauguration to be sworn in and he just married a few days before. He was in his mid70s and he had married a much younger woman, very attractive widow from cuba and he died on the train. [laughter] they said it was his heart. But after all that, no one knew who to nominate for the attorney general to. He is a lawyer, hes been a Democratic Party chairman of the poster you need to become the attorney general . He was slated to become the general so they went to him and said what would you rather do and he said i think i would rather be the attorney general, so he took the job and you can thank me in a smal small part f. [applause] im going to like my biographers call you the rest of my story. [applause] jane and barbara are there greatnieces. They were just so wonderful to work with him so generous in sharing the papers with me. The book couldnt have happened without them. I was a little nervous during the boston accent since obviously i am not from the part of the country. My husband is here in the front row and his father is so i just imitated all of his relatives. Macy in 1933 came in as the private secretary to fdr and was part of a four person management team, steve, the very able press secretary, marvin mcintyre. He was in an oxygen tank by 1935 and then they shipped him off to the Naval Hospital because he was causing so many problems. Its a job title she did not have until eisenhower became president in the 50s because he was a military guy but she did all those things and was open or roosevelt racked up when eleanor was off traveling and as we know travel so much the secret service name was over and there were jokes you would never know when she would pop up like in a coal mine so she would come back and report to the president she felt comfortable letting me see the qquebec an tobacco pod they had a good working relationship by this time she did to feel nervous things were being done wrong or that shed overstepped the boundaries. She knew she was not the first lady. Eleanor was the first lady that lived in the white house and that also meant she worked on call around the clock so she might forget her desk which was her desk was the only one she might hurt all day long at her desk and then evening time might have come into she would organize a poker party or brought in someone to do musical entertainment for mike spent the evening listening to music and talking about the day. Since neither kept a journal we had no idea what kind of conversations took place but we can imagine. She was a very astute person politically. Her High School Education was the only level she had obtained and some people said despite having only a High School Education, Eleanor Roosevelt dropped out of high school she didnt have anything beyond what we would think of as the junior year. None of the people that were running the secretariat had more than a High School Education, so it was not that unusual. Its what fdr treasured for these people that have roots with bluecollar families. Her father might have been an alcoholic irish governor but they really struggled to work in a Department Store as a sales clerk, that kind of thing. Tommy had a fine voice and then started to show up in the opposite the morning and would say i was a line capitol hill or at a Cocktail Party she said that we go tell him that so more often than not fdr would say it said in in in that is how he got his influence and became the white house lobbyist darn capitol hill. He worked for the federal government already so he was already a federal employee but they did not have a lobbyist and he was in trouble to pushing this legislation going through that was the first hundred days than it got harder because the crisis was over even though there was an overwhelmingly democratic Majority Democrats are in an unruly coalition. So it is not always easy to get things passed. Eventually she became so powerful you could not wake fdr up after he went to bed without getting her permission stowe with the early hours on september 1st day from call came to her bedside table that said hitler has invaded poland can wake up the president s . She said yes. So they put the call down to his bedroom and they sat up through the night dealing with this terrible news. Fdr roche out a piece of paper hundreds of these little notes and it summarized what actions he had taken and he signed it fdr in bed september 1st, 1939 and misty put it missy put in her scrapbook that was one of his favorite documents because it was a personal but miss the story of so many people who slave at their jobs in the white house ended sadly we mentioned her rheumatic fever she had more and more heart problems and june 1941 after fdr was sick all spring and she spent countless hours by his bedside during the bedroom during her business in the bedroom she got better with the white house dinner party with a terrible spell that was probably a heart attack and then had a stroke went to the hospital with a severe stroke and was incapacitated and was 44 years old. Every time i got to that part in the book i got so sad she had such a marvelous life she stayed for the summer at the hospital in washington then that fdr suggestion she went down to warm springs for rehabilitation she was paralyzed on one side but had problems with speaking so she was their december 7th when pearl harbor was bombed and was terribly upset and called the white house to talk to her assistant who was filling in she said please someone to talk to the president but he never called her back. The next spring she was so depressed she was making so little progress they thought that would cheer her up but it had the opposite effect and from what i can determine from the nurses logs she was drinking and smoking and eventually set her bed on fire. If your said deal with the we have to fear is fear itself and fire he was terrified of fire. The white house was a tinderbox and after she healed the center to her family to heal. When she passed she had still not seen franklyn from the time that she left. But he continued to stay in touch and send a lovely gifts and cards and pay all of her medical bills and it has been known for some time half of of his estate was left to eleanor into marguerite for her medical care to make sure she was taking care of. Even though she died before he did he did not change in the will. But to this day her grave at the cemetery is kept up by the roosevelt family. What a legacy of her importance. When i went to see her grave that was the first time she really seemed dead but then i read the book again in she is alive. It is the nice thing about the book. [laughter] i really feel sorry for people who start to read to read books write books on many books on hit where do we need . [laughter] but i came away from this one admiring missy even more than when i started. Coming into the project i was convinced i would find out she was the great love of his life i was not at all convinced they had any romantic relationship but what an incredible and important woman she was i hope the readers take that away from the book. So now i can take questions. Talk about their time together. Talking about fdr houseboat. She never mentioned it were still debating it in any interview that she gave but when fdr went to the florida keys he rented a boat one winter then bought one with a friend missing was a hostess. She spent more time with him more than any other adult as he was recovering from polio. He said it was a fine little packet the color said it was a floating tenement. [laughter] it always had things going wrong with it and crammed with people all the time. Lots of visitors and parties and prohibition was going on who cares . Missy was the hostess and she loved fishing. She would go on vacation and go fishing and had the Important Role that Eleanor Roosevelt was unwilling to do to be the emotional companion to fdr during the start time. When they went to warm springs she was the hostess there at the cottage that she owned and though little white house that she built that he built she had her own bedroom and bath on the other side and others to guest to stay in the adjoining room but eleanor usually stayed in the guest house behind the house. They were nice to let me go into missys room i noticed of that yankee to the paper toilet paper and she said we had to do that with both roles that were left here in 1945 because people were stealing eight sheet. D you frame that . [laughter] so she loved her time there but i think the isolation during those months when she did rehabilitation was dreadful because it is a little town in the mill of know where is she was not she was used to be in the middle of things. Can you speak of the relationship with grace . Yes. Grace came to work the campaign for governor as a fill in for missy because she had an illness with a lot of Atrial Fibrillation but it would knock her down for a while. Grace can down after the victory and was warned missy is very protective but the two women got along great. Like two sisters to never argued and all indications that was true because they took their vacations together. Once fdr was in private life he would refer to his staff as the children and that is how he was with missy and grace. But after missys stroke grace moved in her posi