![]() ![]() that's the relationship i'd like to know more about. she really was, on a daily basis, the closest person in the world to him. he had this cocktail hour every night, and somehow she'd be the one to be his hostess. if he were grumpy during the day, she'd arrange a poker game at night. if he had a cold, she'd bring in the cough medicine to the white house. when eleanor traveled, which she did, like, 200 or 250 days a year, she was the one who took care of roosevelt. she never married, and everybody in washington knew that she was really his other wife. she had started working for him when she was only 20 years old, in 1920. goodwin: i think the person that i'm interested in for franklin is not simply lucy mercer - who everybody assumes is the central romantic figure in his life because she had an affair with him back in 1918, and it almost broke up eleanor's marriage - but there's another woman that i think had an even more central role to play in his life, and that was his secretary, missy lehand. brian: if you had to ask a question of either one of themĪbout personal relationships that they had with other people, who would you be most interested in? ms. that was the part that was new and fun for me. so, what i came upon was a sense that the second family quarters of the white house were really like a residential hotel during these years, and there's about seven people living there, all of whom are intimate friends of either franklin or eleanor's. and i came to an understanding that these two characters really both needed other people to meet the untended needs that were left over as a result of their troubled marriage. goodwin: well, i think what i wanted to do in this book was to understand not only franklin and eleanor's relationship - which has been looked at in many, many other cases - but to understand the whole extended family that surrounded them in the white house. brian: what makes this book different than all the rest? ms. but underneath, there was such reserve in him, and i'd want to try and understand why that was so, and why he wouldn't give himself more to the people who loved him. he was the most ebullient, the most charming, most sparkling personality on the surface. i wish you had done it." and i think for him i'd want to understand why he couldn't share himself more fully with anyone. Her, i know she still loved him, and i'd want to say, "why didn't you do it? he's going to die soon.
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