Close To Fdr New Book Suggests Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt And Presidential Archivist

They exchanged a boxful of breezy, tender letters, along with a furtive kiss or two (maybe) in the front seat of his roadster.

In 1935, while sailing on a warship in the South Atlantic, he wrote, “I have longed to have you with me.”

“You know - ” she teased him back coquettishly, “you really are very bad, for you take advantage of a weak woman’s yielding tendencies.”

Valentines, pet names, late-night phone calls: It all sounds faintly, and quaintly, Victorian now. Yet this was no lovesick sailor wooing the gal of his epistolary dreams.

He was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the sitting president of the United States.

She was Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, a distant cousin of FDR’s whom historians have placed within Roosevelt’s small circle of White House intimates.

He was the most powerful man in the free world. She was intelligent, adoring, loyal, discreet - and unattached.

What was the true nature of their relationship? And what impact, if any, might fresh revelations about the two have on our image of the nation’s only four-term president?

These are some of the questions raised by a new book containing never-before-seen letters and diary entries left behind by the mysterious Margaret Suckley, who died in 1991 at age 99.

Suckley first got to know FDR in 1922 and later served as presidential archivist. She lived in the White House at Roosevelt’s behest, traveled with him on numerous road trips, and sat by Roosevelt’s side when he died, in 1945.

The written record of their enduring bond was discovered by friends in a battered suitcase stored beneath Suckley’s bed at her family home in Rhinebeck, N.Y. The papers have been edited and annotated by Geoffrey C. Ward, a distinguished Roosevelt biographer in his own right.

Suckley, who never married, crossed out parts of some documents and destroyed others, according to Ward, in the apparent belief that they might embarrass Roosevelt’s survivors.

“Closest Companion,” to be published in April by Houghton Mifflin, on the 50th anniversary of FDR’s death, carries a burden of expectation that may prove heavy. Advance trade advertising for the book speaks of feelings between FDR and Suckley that “intensified dramatically” after a car ride together in 1935, of the pair becoming “intimate companions” who shared the “secret of this passionate relationship.”

The tone is that of a Harlequin romance novel, although the reality seems somewhat more prosaic.

Perhaps the book may be best defined, at least initially, by what it is not.

It does not offer “proof” that Roosevelt and Suckley were lovers - not in the conventional sense, anyway. From the dozens of letters and journal fragments in Suckley’s possession, including 38 letters in FDR’s handwriting, no such inference can be fairly drawn.

A chaste kiss here and there, expressions of mutual longing, some scraps of romantic poetry and worried ruminations on each other’s health: These bits of evidence will be on the record for future historians to judge, colored by their knowledge that FDR’s marriage to Eleanor Roosevelt - badly strained by revelations of his love affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherford, in 1918 - was more working partnership than perfect union for the last quartercentury of Roosevelt’s life.

As biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin notes in her book “No Ordinary Time,” Eleanor Roosevelt found herself liberated by the couple’s post-Mercer arrangement. She was free to forge her own political identity and close personal friendships, Goodwin writes, often far removed from the Washington fishbowl and prying eyes of the press.

For his part, FDR largely stayed in the White House, surrounded by women - especially his longtime personal secretary, Marguerite LeHand - on whom he focused not only great affection but an addictive need for companionship as well.

The FDR wartime White House functioned more as an elite residential hotel than anything else. Regular guests included Crown Princess Martha of Norway, daughter Anna Roosevelt and, near the end, Lucy Rutherford herself, whom Suckley befriended and admired.

“Roosevelt was a charmer and a flirt, a complex man who needed an assortment of friendships in order to feel complete,” says Goodwin, who interviewed Suckley for her own book but did not have access to the Suckley papers.

“I would doubt enormously that he had an affair with this woman, though, based on everything I know about the two of them.”

Ward makes no claim that the Suckley-FDR relationship was consummated. Suckley, he writes, quoting an unnamed relative of hers, was “adamantly uninterested in sex.”

And as Ward points out, FDR had a penchant for secrecy that covered everything from his physical health to his meetings with Allied leaders. Calling her “MM” (for “My Margaret”) and routing their correspondence through private mail pouches may have only heightened their giddy little game of kiss and don’t tell.

Such qualifiers aside, however, Ward does go on to argue strongly that the relationship between Roosevelt and Suckley was far more intimate than previously reported - and more important to FDR’s well-being than anyone suspected at the time.

“Theirs was an extraordinary friendship,” Ward writes, “unexplored until now yet clearly among the most important of Roosevelt’s life.”