FDR and Eleanor: Did the President hear the wrong woman? \nWASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton almost went postal when a radio reporter asked her recently if she'd always been faithful to the President. Franklin D. Roosevelt did go postal when he was played tapes purporting to show his wife trysting with a young soldier - but the tapes may in fact have caught the young soldier trysting with the woman Eleanor Roosevelt was trying to help him marry.
What prompts all this are newly released FBI files showing FDR tried to deep-six Joseph Lash - the First Lady's future Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer - after hearing the Army Counterintelligence tapes. APBNews says the FBI files show Lash, then a young Army sergeant, ordered overseas post-haste by a furious President Roosevelt, based on the Army surveillance. But the woman heard on the tapes may in fact have been Trude Pratt, Lash's eventual wife.
The FBI files also show bureau director J. Edgar Hoover kept a secret file on Lash, whose sarcastic 1939 testimony before the Dies Committee (the future House Committee on Un-American Activities) attracted both the bureau's and the First Lady's attention in the first place. The Hoover file alleges "the relationship between Roosevelt and Lash had been fully realized," says APBNews.com, and the overall FBI files show Army Counterintelligence taping Lash with a woman in 1943 - a woman the Army Counterintelligence surveillance team believed was Mrs. Roosevelt.
It's long been no secret that the Roosevelts had anything but a truly intimate marriage, just as it has long been no secret that FDR conducted a long-term affair with Lucy Mercer and that Mrs. Roosevelt also had affairs. At the time of the presumed Lash-Eleanor recording, legendarily notorious newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler had alluded in print to Mrs. Roosevelt's "attraction" to "a young campus cutie who had been infected by the Moscow principles."
Two Army Counterintelligence officers brought the tapes in question to the President, who confronted the First Lady with them, provoking a bitter argument. The next morning, APBNews says, FDR tried to deep-six Lash, ordering Army Air Corps General Henry (Hap) Arnold to send him "outside the United States and into combat in the next 10 hours." Lash's son confirms his father was, indeed, sent into service at that time - as a weather observer, seeing little actual combat, APBNews says.
Described by APBNews as "an ideological man" much immersed in left-wing causes, Lash had first attracted Mrs. Roosevelt's attention when he mocked Dies Committee chairman Martin Dies (R-Texas) in a song. "Dies had been giving the students a hard time; he had been very rude to them," historian/biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook tells APBNews. "Eleanor had been sitting at the back of the audience knitting, but when she heard Lash speak, she was very impressed. He was very bold and brave. She moved to the front of the committee room so that [Dies and committee members] would be more respectful in their questions. She sort of came to his rescue."
Lash and the First Lady struck up a correspondence and a friendship which endured until Mrs. Roosevelt died in 1962. They shared a common ideology - and common enemies among anti-Communists who were outraged by Lash's insolence and Mrs. Roosevelt's "commercializing her office as wife of the President," as Pegler had once written. \nEleanor Roosevelt: Did the President hear her - or her friend's future wife?
Ironically, the FBI files show, Mrs. Roosevelt even wrote the Attorney General asking him to gather up whatever the FBI, the Navy, and the Dies Committee "really have" on Lash. She apparently believed Lash was rejected wrongly for a Navy commission and wanted to know if it was justified, APBNews says. Lash's own FBI file has hundreds of pages recording his alliances and activities, but a memo in the file shows the attorney general told by the FBI file there was no investigation.
But then there was the secret Hoover file on Lash. It includes a memo dated Dec. 31, 1943, in which an FBI agent tells the director he's discovered "a possible love affair" between the First Lady and Lash from conversations with an Army Counterintelligence officer. Lash had enlisted in the Army but was kept under close scrutiny because of his leftist politics and his friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt.
APBNews says the files indicate FDR was ready to disband the entire Army Counterintelligence Corps as a result of the tapes. But the tapes have never since been found and some details of the story don't hold up, APBNews says. Former Nebraska Senator Chic Hecht tells APBNews Army Counterintelligence was never disbanded - he was a member in the 1950s - and Cook believes Lash and Eleanor Roosevelt had more a mother and son style relationship.
In fact, APBNews says, Cook believes the First Lady talked Lash's wife into leaving her first husband to marry the young soldier. The FBI file also shows that, around the time Lash and Mrs. Roosevelt were alleged to be having an affair, Lash and his future wife stayed in a hotel together and had had sexual intercourse several times - perhaps the real subject of the Army tapes which outraged the President.
