The unfinished portrait still hangs in the Little White House Museum in Warm Springs, Georgia. The brushwork stops mid-composition, the left side of the background never completed. The painter, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, had stopped working the moment Franklin Roosevelt collapsed. The canvas she had been commissioned to paint, at the request of a woman who was not his wife, captures the president in the final hour of his life.
On the morning of April 12, 1945, Roosevelt sat in a leather armchair in the living room of the Little White House. Shoumatoff was at her easel. Lucy Mercer Rutherford was seated nearby. Franklin’s cousin, Laura Delano, was also present.
At 12:40 in the afternoon, Roosevelt raised his left hand to his temple. He said, “I have a terrific headache. ” He lost consciousness before anyone reached him. The medical response was immediate.
So was the political calculation. The Secret Service and household staff understood within minutes that the president was dying and that the woman in the room was not his wife, not a family member, not anyone who could appear in the official account of that moment. Lucy Mercer Rutherford left Warm Springs before Eleanor Roosevelt’s plane landed. The official narrative held that Eleanor, the devoted wife and wartime partner, had been beside him at the end.
She was actually at a tea in Washington when she was called. The White House communications machinery calculated that this story would hold. It held for twenty-one years. Then a collection of five thousand documents, kept in private hands for six decades, nearly went to auction.
A special act of Congress was required to bring them into the National Archives. Among those pages was a letter written on black-bordered widow’s stationery, marked personal and private, arranging a secret visit to Warm Springs. The writer never used Roosevelt’s name. She called him the subject, once the B, shorthand for boss.
The writer was Lucy Mercer Rutherford. By the time that letter entered the public record, Lucy had been dead for sixty-two years. She had entered Roosevelt’s world in 1914, when Eleanor hired her as a social secretary, three mornings a week. Lucy Page Mercer was twenty-three, from a Washington family that had lost its fortune in the panic of 1893.
What remained was social fluency and a quality that multiple Roosevelt family members later described independently in nearly identical terms: she made people feel entirely at ease. Franklin noticed her in 1916 while Eleanor and the children were at Campobello. He arranged yachting parties on the Potomac, dinners she attended and Eleanor did not. In 1917, Lucy left Eleanor’s employment.
The record uses the words quit or was fired without resolving which, and she enlisted in the Navy. Franklin was assistant secretary of the Navy. Lucy was assigned to his office. In September of 1918, Franklin returned from Europe sick with pneumonia.
Sailors carried him off the ship. Eleanor unpacked his luggage. Inside, wrapped in velvet ribbon, she found a packet of perfumed letters from Lucy. She offered a divorce.
Franklin’s mother, Sarah, threatened to cut off his inheritance. Political adviser Louis Howe said divorce would end the career before it truly began. Lucy’s Catholic faith prohibited marriage to a divorced man regardless. Franklin chose the career.
He promised Eleanor he would never see Lucy again. In 1920, Lucy married Winthrop Rutherford, a wealthy New York widower sixteen years her senior, with six children. She became stepmother and estate manager and disappeared from the public record entirely. The correspondence with Franklin continued through private channels across the 1920s and 1930s.
Three authorities had made predictions about what would happen when Roosevelt died. Roosevelt’s political architects had calculated in 1918 that ending the affair would seal the record permanently. A promise was made. Letters were surrendered.
The woman was removed from the household. The affair continued for twenty-seven more years, and the archivists who processed FDR’s papers after his death concluded that the private correspondence had been destroyed. Franklin invited Lucy to his first inauguration in 1933. The car was arranged through White House logistics, and Eleanor was not informed.
She attended all four inaugurations under similar arrangements. Winthrop Rutherford died in the spring of 1944. Within months, the visits resumed. This time they were arranged by Anna Roosevelt, Franklin’s eldest daughter, who managed her father’s personal schedule as his health declined visibly.
Anna later said Franklin was a sick and exhausted man who needed companionship and that Lucy provided something Eleanor, by her own admission, could not. Eleanor knew nothing. Not the White House meetings, not the drives, not the trips to Warm Springs. The portrait session was Lucy’s idea.
She had commissioned Shoumatoff, a Russian-born painter, to travel to Warm Springs and begin a formal portrait of Franklin, a private commission for herself. After the president’s death, Laura Delano disclosed the truth, not to the press, but to Eleanor, in the days following the funeral. She told her that Lucy had been present when Franklin died and that Anna had been arranging visits for over a year. The rupture between Eleanor and her daughter lasted years.
Lucy drove south to her estate in Aiken, South Carolina. She gave no interviews. She issued no statement. In the weeks that followed, she destroyed Franklin’s letters to her.
Thirty years of correspondence across depression and mobilization and D-Day and Yalta burned. What the FDR Presidential Library now holds are four letters from 1926 to 1928, found not in Lucy’s papers but in donated family documents decades later. Eleanor sent Lucy a small painting of Franklin after the funeral. Lucy responded with a letter.
She wrote that Franklin had spoken of Eleanor constantly at the end, of her courage, her work, the things she had built. She said she had loved him and hoped Eleanor understood the nature of that love. Eleanor received the letter. She read it.
She never replied. She spent the next seventeen years building the work that made Harry Truman call her the first lady of the world. She did not mention Lucy Mercer Rutherford publicly again. Lucy died on July 31, 1948, of leukemia.
She was fifty-seven years old, buried at Tranquility Cemetery in Tranquility, New Jersey. Her New York Times obituary was sixty-two words. It did not mention Franklin Roosevelt. The silence held through the 1940s and 1950s.
It fractured in 1966 when Jonathan Daniels, a former Roosevelt aide, published a book naming Lucy directly and describing the affair as thirty years long. The Roosevelt family disputed details. Elliott Roosevelt later confirmed the core account. The deeper archive remained closed for another forty-four years.
Grace Tully, FDR’s personal secretary, had taken five thousand pages of documents when she left the White House on April 12. The collection sat in private hands for six and a half decades. In 2010, it nearly went to auction. Federal legislation co-sponsored by Senators Schumer and Slaughter was required to transfer it to the National Archives.
Among those five thousand pages sat the letter on black-bordered widow’s stationery, marked personal and private, arranging the final visit to Warm Springs. Lucy never wrote Roosevelt’s name in it. Her love letters had cost her once before in 1918. She did not make that mistake again.
Lucy Mercer Rutherford was Roosevelt’s private constant across three decades of American crisis. She held none of the titles. She appeared in none of the official photographs. She was in the room when he died and removed before his wife arrived.
She destroyed the evidence, died three years later, and received sixty-two words that omitted his name. Historians still argue about what existed between them after 1918. The destroyed correspondence guarantees that argument will never fully close. That was most likely exactly what Lucy intended.
Power removed her from the room before Eleanor’s plane landed. The archive put her back.