Franklin and Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherfurd, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life

By: Joseph E. Persico

RooseveltÆs dalliance with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, conducted when he was a young assistant Navy secretary, has been known for years.

Persico retells it in the context of the intimate lives of Franklin and Eleanor more generally. He focuses on the rift that Eleanor's discovery of the liaison in 1918 introduced into the Roosevelt's 13-year-old marriage, before pivoting to a thorough chronicle of RooseveltÆs subsequent relationships with various women, including a probably amorous one with Marguerite LeHand, known as Missy, his longtime personal aide.

Persico speculates, too, about an encounter with Margaret, or Daisy, Suckley, a distant cousin of the president's, and leaves scattered hints about Dorothy Schiff, the publisher of The New York Post, and Princess Martha of Norway. For good measure, the book revisits the probably romantic attachment between Eleanor Roosevelt and the journalist turned White House aide, and White House resident, Lorena Hickok.