The Gatekeeper: Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Story of the Partnership That Defined a Presidency by Kathryn Smith (review)

A long-standing axiom of U.S. presidential politics is that White House staff are meant to be seen and not heard. Even in Abraham Lincoln’s time his two secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, were not widely known to the public until after they left his service and wrote his first authoritative biography. Their successors have largely labored in obscurity until the latter part of the20th century, when staffers such as James Baker and Michael Deaver (under President Ronald Reagan), Leon Panetta (Bill Clinton), Karl Rove (George W. Bush), and David Axelrod (Barrack Obama) gained prominence that helped define the White House. Often this person is the chief of staff, chief political adviser, press secretary, or, occasionally, the national security adviser.

Even in Franklin Roosevelt’s White House only Harry Hopkins was known to the outside world, primarily because he headed several New Deal agencies, such as the Works Progress Administration, dispensing funds for employment and relief. Roosevelt had no chief of staff per se, but he did trust Marguerite LeHand to act on his behalf. Missy, as she was known, was closer than anyone else in the administration to the president, and she could unerringly anticipate his needs, finish his sentences, and know instinctively whom he would like to see and whom he did not want to see.

LeHand was a hugely consequential person in President Roosevelt’s life and presidency, and she has long deserved a biography that recognizes her unique role. Kathryn Smith, a journalist and writer, has added an important new book to the body of FDR literature with a splendid work appropriately titled The Gatekeeper—Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Story of the Partnership That Defined a Presidency. That partnership, which began in the early 1920s, lasted until 1941, when LeHand was felled by a stroke. During those two decades she devoted herself to Roosevelt, helping him to recover from polio, to answer his mail, and—during the hardest part of his life—to believe he still had a political future. Above all she was a confidante to someone who rarely opened himself up to others.

For a woman of LeHand’s modest background and education, reaching the White House with Roosevelt was heady stuff, but she never let it go to her head. The press tried to persuade her to reveal tidbits of news, but she was unfailingly discreet—except once when she let slip to a journalist that her boss “was really incapable of a personal friendship with anyone” (p. 104). (Whether she included herself in this remark is unclear, but in any case it was problematic insofar as Roosevelt subsequently developed an extraordinarily close “personal friendship” with his sixth cousin, Daisy Suckley.)

LeHand’s official title was “secretary” to the president, but Smith aptly calls her “the Swiss Army knife of the White House, a formidable multitalented multitasker” (p. 157) who did everything from directing other staffers, scheduling medical appointments for the Roosevelt children, telling the president that part of a speech “just doesn’t sound like you” (ibid.), soothing those who were denied entry into the Oval Office, offering advice on key appointments, and telling the president things he did not want to hear, including when it was time to go home and go to bed. Smith is at her best in describing LeHand’s complex relationship with Roosevelt, less so her dealings with other key players in the administration and how they fit into the president’s world.

Roosevelt wanted LeHand nearby at all times, so she lived one floor above him in the White House. She was usually the first one to see him in the morning, and she often had dinner with him in the Oval Study next to his bedroom when he was alone. Because Eleanor was frequently traveling on behalf of her husband, LeHand became known as the “office wife” in...