It could never happen today. But Hillary Clinton’s idol, Eleanor Roosevelt, was permitted a zone of privacy modern politicians can only envy. In 1992, the first volume of Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt (also known as “ER”) caused a flap when Cook, a feminist historian, asserted what others had hinted at or gossiped about–that the First Lady had both a male lover (her former bodyguard Earl Miller) and a female lover, Lorena Hickok. Historians harrumphed that Cook could not prove a physical relationship, but the letters she excerpts in her second of presumably several volumes are suggestive (“Darling, I ache for you…”).
In numbing detail, Cook celebrates ER’s devotions to the poor, minorities and women. But the author is not a hagiographer. She takes Eleanor to task for failing to speak out against Nazi oppression of Germany’s Jews–“A silence beyond repair”–and shrewdly deconstructs the complex marriage of Eleanor and FDR. To cook for the White House, Eleanor chose a harridan who served execrable meals: watery soups, salads tossed with chunks of marshmallow, peas “as hard as bullets.” ER was not at all indifferent to food herself, Cook points out. She was getting even with FDR for his dalliances. He grumbled but ate the food. “To do otherwise,” writes Cook, “would have destroyed the first couple’s hard-won balance of power.” First Marriages are apparently as inscrutable as anybody’s. Hillary would understand.
