Franklin Delano Roosevelt And Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd
FDR Presidential Library and MuseumBy the time Roosevelt died in 1945 he had had a mistress for over three decades.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945, he was not with his wife but with his mistress. Eleanor Roosevelt was in Washington, D.C., while Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd was with the president at his cottage in Georgia.
Roosevelt met Rutherfurd 30 years earlier in 1914, after she was hired as his wife’s social secretary. She quickly became a beloved member of their family. But in 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt was pained by the discovery of incriminating letters written by Rutherfurd while unpacking her husband’s suitcase.
“The bottom dropped out of my own particular world, and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time,” Eleanor later wrote to a friend.
Devastated, Eleanor offered her husband a divorce. However, Roosevelt demurred — not only was his mother against the idea, but divorce could sink his rising political star. Instead, he accepted his wife’s ultimatum. He would never again share her bed and he would no longer see Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd.
Though Roosevelt obeyed the first part of this deal, it seems highly likely that his affair with Rutherfurd continued.
Public DomainLucy Mercer Rutherfurd circa 1913, the year she started working for the Roosevelt family.
From then on, Roosevelt and Rutherfurd had carefully and occasionally continued to see each other. But over the years, they left a faint trail.
Some historians believe that Rutherfurd attended Roosevelt’s inauguration in secret, hiding in the back of a limo. She may have also visited the White House under an assumed name.
In surviving letters between the two — Rutherfurd destroyed most of her correspondence with the president after his death — they seem casual and chatty, but also strangely specific about times and places, and when Eleanor Roosevelt would be out of town.
When Lucy evoked an old memory, Roosevelt responded, “I do remember the times — so well — à toujours et toujours,” with a conclusion in French meaning “forever and ever.”
Though some suspect that Roosevelt carried on a handful of other affairs, his relationship with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd seems the most significant. In the decades after they met, she was at his side when he took his last breath.
