On April 12, 1945, at about 3:30 in the afternoon, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. He had collapsed earlier that day while sitting for a portrait, painted by artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, with his signature navy cape draped over his shoulders—a deliberate symbol of his involvement in the creation of the United Nations Charter. The president had been in Warm Springs since March 30, seeking rest under the strict supervision of his cardiologist, Dr. Howard Bruen, who had ordered a regimen of quiet and limited activity.
Also present that day was Lucy Mercer Rutherford, the woman who had once been Eleanor Roosevelt’s social secretary and who had carried on a secret romance with Franklin for more than three decades. She had been invited to Warm Springs at the president’s request, and her presence there, hidden from the First Lady, was the culmination of a long and carefully concealed relationship that had survived political ambition, scandal, marriage, war, and the passage of time. Lucy Mercer first entered Franklin Roosevelt’s life in 1914, when Eleanor, overwhelmed by the demands of Washington society after Franklin’s appointment as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, hired the twenty-three-year-old Lucy as her social secretary. Described as striking, charming, and poised, Lucy was the daughter of a once-prosperous Catholic family from Maryland, with roots reaching back to the founding of the colony in the 1630s.
Franklin, by contrast, was descended from Dutch merchant Claes Maartenszen van Rosenvelt and from the Delano line, a family with connections to William the Conqueror and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Both came from the upper reaches of American society, but their circumstances were quite different. The Roosevelts were wealthy Hudson Valley aristocrats; the Mercers had fallen from financial grace, and Lucy’s father, Carrol Mercer, had struggled with military disgrace and money problems for much of his life. At first, Lucy’s presence in the Roosevelt household was routine.
She handled Eleanor’s correspondence and assisted with social engagements. But she quickly caught Franklin’s attention. By 1916, with Eleanor pregnant with their fifth child and exhausted by the demands of motherhood, the marriage had grown strained. Eleanor, drained by repeated pregnancies and the endless obligations of Washington life, withdrew from her husband emotionally.
Franklin, charming and restless, found in Lucy a warm and attentive companion. Their relationship deepened as the United States entered World War I in 1917, when wartime duties kept Franklin in Washington while Eleanor and the children escaped the summer heat. Eleanor, increasingly suspicious, dismissed Lucy from her employment that summer, but Lucy immediately enlisted as a Yeomanette in the Navy Department, ensuring that she and Franklin crossed paths almost daily. Friends and relatives, including Franklin’s own cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth, facilitated their meetings, providing places where the couple could be alone away from public scrutiny.
The affair continued through 1917 and into 1918, carried on with Franklin’s apparent relish for the secrecy and Lucy’s genuine affection for a man who offered her the charm and attention she craved. The affair ended in September 1918, when Eleanor, unpacking Franklin’s luggage after he returned from a trip, discovered a bundle of love letters from Lucy. The discovery was devastating. Eleanor confronted Franklin, and a divorce was discussed.
But Franklin’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, intervened, threatening to cut off the financial support that sustained the family’s lifestyle. Franklin’s political adviser, Louis Howe, also warned that a divorce would destroy his political future. Faced with the loss of both his family and his ambitions, Franklin agreed to end the relationship with Lucy. The marriage survived, but it was transformed.
Eleanor, hardened by the betrayal, began to build an independent life of her own, eventually becoming a powerful political figure in her own right. Franklin, chastened, turned his attention to his family and his career. Lucy, meanwhile, left Washington and eventually found stability in 1920 when she married Winthrop Rutherford, a wealthy New York widower more than twenty years her senior. Rutherford offered her a secure home, a prominent place in society, and a role as stepmother to his children.
The marriage was practical and respectable, and it removed Lucy from the immediate orbit of the Roosevelt family. She informed Franklin of her engagement through a mutual friend, and his reaction, described as startled but silent, suggested that he still carried feelings for her. Eleanor, for her part, noted the marriage with relief. For more than two decades, Franklin and Lucy had almost no contact.
Franklin’s life was transformed in 1921 when he was stricken with polio, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. With Eleanor’s help and Louis Howe’s guidance, he rebuilt his political career, returning to the national stage at the 1924 Democratic National Convention, where he nominated Al Smith for president while struggling to the podium on crutches and braces. His election as president in 1932 came in the depths of the Great Depression, and his inaugural address, with its famous insistence that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” defined his approach to leadership. Lucy, meanwhile, settled into a comfortable life with Rutherford, dividing her time between their estate in Allamuchy, New Jersey, and Aiken, South Carolina, where they built a home called Ridgely Hall.
She devoted herself to her husband, who was increasingly frail, and to the children, both Rutherford’s and their daughter Barbara, born in 1922. Despite her changed circumstances, Lucy maintained a correspondence with Roosevelt, and by the late 1920s they had resumed a distant, cordial connection. In 1941, when Winthrop’s health collapsed after a series of strokes, Lucy wrote to Roosevelt asking for help finding specialists in Washington. That request reopened the door.
In June 1941, Franklin and Lucy met again for the first time in more than twenty years. Roosevelt was now fifty-nine, president of the United States, navigating the crisis of a world at war. Lucy was fifty, recently devoted to caring for an invalid husband. Their reunion came at a moment when the United States was still officially neutral, though the fall of France in 1940 had left Britain standing alone against Nazi Germany.
With Eleanor pursuing her own initiatives and travels, and with both Winthrop and Roosevelt’s secretary Missy LeHand incapacitated, Franklin and Lucy found opportunities to see each other. According to White House records, Lucy visited Roosevelt under the pseudonym “Mrs. Paul Johnson,” often dining with him alone in the White House and attending to him during his private moments. The meetings were discreet, arranged with unmarked cars and secret phone lines, and they revived the old closeness that had never truly died.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into World War II and consumed Roosevelt’s attention for the remainder of his life. Still, his connection to Lucy endured. In 1944, after Winthrop Rutherford died in March, Lucy was left alone after twenty-four years of marriage. That same year, Roosevelt, suffering from high blood pressure, heart failure, and fluid in his lungs, met Lucy during a rest at Bernard Baruch’s estate in South Carolina.
Their friendship was rekindled, and with the help of Roosevelt’s daughter Anna, who had moved into the White House in March 1944 and was increasingly managing her father’s personal affairs, Lucy visited the White House and other locations while Eleanor was away. Anna facilitated these meetings without her mother’s knowledge, a decision that would have profound consequences in the aftermath of her father’s death. By early 1945, Roosevelt’s health was in steep decline. The Yalta Conference in February had taken a visible toll, and his return to the United States in March left him exhausted.
In April, with plans for a restful period at Warm Springs, Lucy arranged for Elizabeth Shoumatoff to paint his portrait. On April 9, Lucy arrived at Warm Springs with Shoumatoff, who had been commissioned to paint the president in his cape. For a few days, Roosevelt seemed to improve. He attended to presidential duties in the mornings and relaxed in the afternoons, enjoying Lucy’s company and her calming presence.
On April 12, Shoumatoff began the portrait session. The president complained of a headache, then slumped forward in his chair. Despite immediate medical attention, he never regained consciousness. At 3:30 that afternoon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was dead.
Lucy and Shoumatoff left Warm Springs hastily before the president’s family arrived. Shoumatoff, pursued by the press, held a conference afterward but respected Lucy’s wish to remain unnamed. Lucy, for her part, destroyed all of Roosevelt’s letters, ensuring that the full extent of their relationship would not be exposed during her lifetime. The task of informing Eleanor fell to Press Secretary Steve Early and Dr.
Ross McIntire. Eleanor was away at a speaking engagement and instinctively understood the gravity of the summons, but she maintained her composure until the news was confirmed. When she arrived in Warm Springs, she sought details of her husband’s final moments from Daisy Suckley and Laura Delano, the cousins who had been with him. It was Laura Delano who revealed the truth: Franklin had been with Lucy when he died, and Anna had arranged their meetings.
For Eleanor, this was a profound betrayal—not only had her husband renewed his relationship with the woman who had nearly destroyed her marriage, but her own daughter had been complicit. After his death, Eleanor sorted through Franklin’s belongings at Hyde Park. In a gesture of closure, she sent Lucy a small watercolor of the president that Shoumatoff had painted. Lucy continued to live quietly, rotating between her homes in Aiken and Allamuchy, until her health declined.
She was diagnosed with leukemia and died on July 31, 1948, at the age of fifty-seven. Anna Roosevelt expressed her sadness in a letter to Daisy Suckley. Lucy’s obituary in the New York Times devoted more attention to her husband and his first wife than to her own life, a final anonymity that likely would not have troubled her.
She was buried next to Winthrop Rutherford, in the quiet peace she had sought for so much of her life.