The Secretary, the President, His Wife, and Her Lover

Expert diplomatic poker player that he was, Molotov gave [Ribbentrop] no sign of being in a hurry.

- William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich



To unwind after his days managing a depression and then a world war, Franklin Roosevelt hosted a nightly cocktail hour in his second-floor study. "How about another sippy?" he would ask from his wheelchair before splashing together old-fashioneds and martinis amid the clutter of his desk. Though he seldom had more than one drink, he relished this down-time for the chance it gave him and his staff to recharge their batteries, the better to face the mind-bending decisions the next day would certainly bring. A simple dinner would often be served, followed a few times a week by a game of low-stakes poker.



Teetotaling Eleanor Roosevelt adamantly refused to participate in any gambling game, let alone one whose object was to mislead opponents in order to take their money; nor had she shared Franklin's bed since discovering his love affair with Lucy Mercer back in 1918. The cocktails and poker were organized by presidential secretary Marguerite "Missy" LeHand, whose third-floor bedroom was directly above FDR's. In No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin reports, "Missy was in love with her boss and regarded herself as his other wife. Nor was she alone in her imaginings. 'There's no doubt,' White House aide Raymond Moley said, 'that Missy was as close to being a wife as he ever had – or could have.'" According to advisor Eliot Janeway, "In terms of companionship, Missy was the real wife." Even the Roosevelts' son Elliott seemed to accept that Missy and his father were lovers. "Everyone in the closely knit inner circle of father's friends accepted it as a matter of course."



Regulars in the poker games included Missy and her boss, advisors Harry Hopkins and Gen. Edwin "Pa" Watson, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Admiral Ross McIntire (the president's physician), Press Secretary Stephen Early, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Attorney General Robert Jackson, and Eleanor's intimate friend Lorena Hickok, a cigar-smoking AP reporter whose bedroom adjoined the first lady's. "I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms," Eleanor wrote in one of the thousands of letters the women exchanged while apart. Their most explicit letters were burned, though not the one in which Hickok wrote, "I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips." Whatever Ken Starr might think of these domestic arrangements, it's clear that neither Hickok nor LeHand required a poker nom de guerre.



McIntire always insisted that the game end by 11 o'clock, so his patient could get enough sleep, though the commander in chief was sometimes able to cajole the admiral into letting him play an extra 45 minutes or so. When the deal rotated to him, the president usually chose either seven-card stud with the one-eyed jacks wild or "Woolworth's," in which fives and tens were wild. Jackson recalled that Roosevelt "seemed to relax under the stimulus of the game and for the moment we forgot the war." The limits were so low that Jackson lost only $2.30 during a weeklong fishing trip in Florida, during which he, the president, and four others played every night; Roosevelt was that week's biggest winner, netting a grand total of $18. On weekends back in Washington, the action often moved to Ickes' Maryland estate, where the food was better and privacy easier to come by. The most expensive session was a $1-limit affair in which Ickes won $53.50 and the president lost $35.



The millionaire president overruled most requests to raise the stakes, because for him the game's purpose was "an exchange of much conversation but little money," according to Justice Robert H. Jackson. Gen. Watson accepted this policy but insisted they abide by his Powder River Conventions, which called for him to shoot any player who announced his hand incorrectly. Amid such jocularity, Jackson observed, Roosevelt "studied the players as much as he did the cards," though Jackson believed Admiral McIntire was the most skilled of the bunch. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that one of the toughest players in Washington, Vice President John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner, was never invited. The son of a Confederate cavalry trooper, Garner (1868-1967) had grown up playing high-stakes draw, amply lubricated by bourbon and branch water. He represented his Texas congressional district in the US House of Representatives for 30 years, rising to speaker in 1931; and during most of those years, his poker winnings exceeded his congressional salary. As vice president, he dismissed his boss's games as "just for conversation."



The fact was, the two failed to get along on a number of fronts. Roosevelt had invited Garner onto the ticket in 1932 only to reward him for delivering his delegates from Texas and California on the fourth ballot of the Democrats' convention in Chicago. Though Garner later called running for vice president "the worst damn fool mistake I ever made" and the job itself "not worth a bucket of warm piss," his legislative experience and personal friendship with hundreds of congressmen were crucial in getting key New Deal initiatives passed during the administration's first hundred days. But his enthusiasm for the "second New Deal" cooled considerably when, during their second term, FDR pushed for programs that Garner and others thought smacked of class warfare and made sure they didn't get passed. Roosevelt dumped Garner from the 1940 ticket and, with Henry Wallace as his running mate, went on to win his third term.



"New Deal" was the poker expression FDR had given to a wide-ranging series of federal programs designed to help the "forgotten man at the bottom of the barrel" make it through the Depression. How to Win at Stud Poker, a 1938 primer by James Wickstead, had a similar sense of morality. Wickstead was writing for players looking for convivial entertainment. The goal was never to clean out your tablemates, most of whom were your friends. Cheating them would be unimaginable – certainly not in the spirit of the popular president.



"Establish a strict limit," Wickstead advised, "either for bet sizes or the total amount a player can lose for the evening." Either type of restriction would act "as a 'governor' and is more consonant with equity and fairness." Lower limits, he said, besides being more fair, made it easier to play good poker. "Oftentimes a player's game is ruined due to the fact that … the limit is too steep to permit a free and easy style of play." Worse, he "loses his ability to diagnose the simplest hands and, as a consequence, becomes prey to fear," when the only thing he should have to fear, of course, is fear itself.



Not that the players in the low-limit White House game didn't want to win. Goodwin provides an example of how competitive FDR and his pals were:



It was the president's custom each year on the night that Congress was due to adjourn to host a poker game in his study. … [W]hoever was ahead at the moment the Speaker called to say that Congress had officially adjourned would be declared the winner. On this night Morgenthau was far ahead when the Speaker phoned, but Roosevelt pretended that the call was from someone else and the game continued until midnight, when Roosevelt finally pulled ahead. At this point, Roosevelt whispered to an aide to go into another office and call the study. When the phone rang, he pretended it was the Speaker and declared himself the winner. Everyone was in high spirits until the next morning, when Morgenthau read in the paper that Congress had officially adjourned at 9 p.m. He was so angry that he handed in his resignation. Only when the president called and convinced him it was all in good fun did Morgenthau agree to stay.



Yet, anyone who thinks the penny-ante poker and related shenanigans were merely good fun should consider their underlying purpose – to help the crippled president decompress every night among friends after dealing with a depression and, in his third and fourth terms, with the most devastating war the world has ever known. His teetotaling counterpart in Berlin, on the other hand, had no friends and refused to take a break. Several historians, Goodwin included, note that "Hitler diminished his strength through overwork." As Joseph Goebbels, the minister for propaganda, wrote in his diary: "The Fuhrer seems to have aged 15 years during three and a half years of war. He does not relax. He sits in his bunker, fusses and broods." Minister for Armaments Albert Speer believed Hitler's failure to relax left him "permanently caustic and irritable," much less effective in managing the Wehrmacht. When one of Hitler's doctors insisted that he rest in bed for at least a week, the patient flatly refused, shrieking, "You have all conspired among you to make a sick man out of me!"



While their own commander in chief played Woolworth's for a couple of dollars a pot, American GI's and officers were carrying poker to Europe, North Africa, China, the Pacific, and finally Japan. The United States Playing Card Company secretly worked with the Defense Department to make special decks to be sent as gifts for POW's. When the cards were moistened, they peeled apart to reveal sections of a map indicating escape routes. Other cards, called "spotters," showed the silhouettes of enemy tanks, ships, and aircraft. On many of the 30 million regular decks issued by Allied pursers and quartermasters, FDR was depicted as the king of diamonds, Churchill the king of spades, Stalin the king of hearts, de Gaulle the king of clubs; Hitler, as the joker, had a bomb dropping onto his head.



The general in charge of most of those troops, Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower, had learned to play poker as an 8-year-old back in Abilene. His main teacher was a frontiersman and hunting guide named Bob Davis, who also showed him how to hunt, fish, and trap, and to cook what he killed. Once the meal was finished and the utensils were clean, Davis made young Dwight memorize poker odds. "He dinned percentages into my head night after night around a campfire," Ike wrote decades later, "using for the lessons a greasy pack of nicked cards that must have been a dozen years old. We played for matches and whenever my box of matches was exhausted, I'd have to roll in my blankets and go to sleep." As a West Point upperclassman in 1915, he attended "cadet dances only now and then, preferring to devote my time to poker." During World War I he paid for his dress uniform and courted the hard-to-get Mamie Doud with his winnings. Sitting down in one game with only two silver dollars, he stood up a few hours later with more than a hundred of them.



As Supreme Allied Commander in 1944, he outfoxed the Nazis on D-Day with a variety of bluffing maneuvers before taking Normandy Beach. Stephen Ambrose writes in D-Day that before the assault, "dummy paratroopers dropped by the SAS convinced some German commanders that the whole operation was a bluff." He also reports that as Allied soldiers and sailors prepared for the invasion, gambling "was the favorite boredom killer. There were virtually nonstop poker and crap games." Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, photographer Robert Capa, Don Whitehead of the Associated Press, and most other correspondents played poker, as well. Shaw wrote that while the Luftwaffe was bombing London, "it was considered very bad form indeed to hesitate before placing a bet or to move away from the table, no matter how close the hits or how loud the anti-aircraft fire."



Some of the eleventh-hour action became rather frenzied – "like nothing I'd ever seen before," one Canadian sapper recalled. "There was no use in holding back, nothing made any difference, bet the lot. When officers came around they would sort of cover the money with the blankets they were playing on." Nothing made any difference, bet the lot – probably what William Gill had been thinking when he lost his gold watch before the mustard gas wafted over his trench in 1918, and what many blue- and gray-coated infantrymen felt before each blood-soaked melee.



On June 5, 1944, the night before D-Day, Pfc. Felix Branham of the 116th Infantry tried to get everyone on his ship to sign a 500-franc note he'd won in a poker game. Asked why, he said, "Fellas, some of us are never getting out of this alive. We may never see each other again. We may be crippled, or whatever. So sign this." In 1994 Branham still had the framed note hanging on his wall, and insisted, "I wouldn't take anything for it."



Struggling to describe the brotherhood that developed among the crew of his B-17, the "Memphis Belle," pilot Robert Morgan said, "I don't know that anybody has ever invented a word that fits what I'm trying to say. Our crew sure as hell never tried to describe it. It was too sacred to have a name, so we played poker and drank whiskey instead." Whatever combination of skill and emotion they shared, nothing conveyed or complemented it better than a few well-timed bluffs and some booze. Morgan added that "it was a way of setting fear aside, and it was interdependence – a way of knowing at every instant under extreme duress what the other fellow's function was, and how he was handling it." When Hemingway spoke of a bullfighter's "grace under pressure," or Shaw of the refusal to flinch in the face of a raise or a bomb, they were talking about something similar. Part of the secret, FDR knew, involved getting out from under the pressure on a regular basis, preferably in the company of those you were sharing it with.