God's Gift to the U.S.A.: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Both early and late in his life, Roosevelt pursued Lucy Mercer with a love that was truly reckless. An impoverished Maryland aristocrat, Lucy was 22, nine years younger than Roosevelt, when she began serving his wife as social secretary in Washington. One day in 1918, Eleanor found some letters that Lucy had written him, and there was a terrible scene. Eleanor told him that he must either break with Lucy forever or she would "give him his freedom." When they both reported this situation to Roosevelt's mother, however, she warned that if he abandoned his five children, she would cut him off without a penny (despite his Navy position, he still depended on a parental allowance, though he ultimately left an estate of $1 million). Roosevelt apparently decided to choose Lucy, come what might, but Lucy said that as a Roman Catholic she could not marry a divorced man. Instead, she soon married a wealthy widower, Winthrop Rutherfurd, and the Roosevelts patched together their semblance of a domestic life.

More than 20 years later, in 1941, Lucy returned to Washington from the Rutherfurd estate in South Carolina so that her ailing septuagenarian husband could get the best medical attention. Eleanor Roosevelt, busy with her career in good works, seems never to have known that Lucy Rutherfurd began coming secretly to dine at the White House.

On the morning of April 12, 1945, at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga., Roosevelt complained of a headache but seemed to be in good spirits. He poked around in his beloved stamp collection and inspected some new specimens that the Japanese had issued during their occupation of the Philippines. It was nearly lunchtime when he said to a woman who was painting his portrait, "Now we've got just about 15 minutes more to work." Then, as she watched him silently studying some papers, he groaned, pressed a hand to his temple, and fell into a coma from which he never recovered.