48

The Woman with Woman’s Digest

The Road to the White House

Next month Anna Roosevelt
will tell her personal story of her
father's return to public life as
Governor of New York and his
first campaign for the Presi-
dency.

I

Conference in Paris which they were
to witness, or the discussions I had
heard as to the advisability of Presi-
dent Wilson’s breaking a tradition
and leaving this country to attend the
conference and start the League of
Nations on its way. But I was wor-
ried to hear from Father by letter that
Mother was very ill in London with
pleurisy, and then to hear later that
she insisted on getting out of bed be-
fore she was well so that she could
visit the battle fronts with Father.

And of course, when they both
finally returned home (crossing the
Atlantic on the same ship, but this
time with President and Mrs. Wood-
row Wilson), we all listened agog to
their descriptions of the horrible
waste of war and of the heroism of
some of the farmers and storekeepers
in little towns.

I was to remember these descrip-
tions when I, too, visited these bat-
tlefields two summers later with
Granny and my brother, Jimmy.

When Father was nominated for
Vice President on the Demo-
cratic ticket, at the 1920 convention
in San Francisco, I had my first taste

of political life with a candidate. As a
great treat, Father and Mother took
me to Dayton, Ohio, to hear Gover- *
nor James M. Cox’s acceptance speech
as Democratic Presidential nominee.
Mr. Cox made his speech at his beau-
tiful home, “Tfailsend,” near Day-
ton, and he and Mrs. Cox were more
than kind to a shy fourteen-year-old.

That summer was a mixture of ex-
citement over the campaign life my
father was leading, and the interest
I was slowly gaining in the League
of Nations. I don’t remember Fa-
ther’s ever telling me, alone, any-
thing about his hopes and aspirations
for victory that fall. Now I know*'
that, in all probability, Father and
Governor Cox realized that the peo-
ple in this country were not yet ready,
to accept an international peace or- ■
ganization as a necessity for preserv-
ing world peace. And the main theme
of their campaign speeches was the •
League of Nations.

All that summer was exciting. We
came to know well the people who
were extra right hands for Father
during his entire campaign: Louis J
Howe, whom we had known slightly 1
since we were very small children; ’
Steve Early, a newspaper man who i
later was Father’s presidential secre- j
tary in charge of press relations dur- i
ing what Father’s political enemies * ,
used to call the “twelve long years”
and who was recendy appointed by
President Truman as Undersecretary q
of Defense; Marvin McIntyre, who*
also became one of Father’s Presi-
dential Secretaries; and Thomas