Missy LeHand | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Personal Secretary to the President | |
| In office March 4, 1933 – June 4, 1941 | |
| President | Franklin D. Roosevelt |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Grace Tully |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Marguerite Alice LeHand September 13, 1896 Potsdam, New York, U.S. |
| Died | July 31, 1944 (aged 47) Chelsea, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Political party | Democratic |
Marguerite Alice "Missy" LeHand (September 13, 1896 – July 31, 1944) was a private secretary to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) for 21 years. According to LeHand's biographer Kathryn Smith in The Gatekeeper, she eventually functioned as White House Chief of Staff, the only woman in American history to do so.[1]
Born into a blue collar, Irish-American family in upstate New York, LeHand studied secretarial science in high school, took a series of clerical jobs, and began to work for the Franklin Roosevelt vice presidential campaign in New York. Following the Democrats' defeat, FDR's wife, Eleanor, invited her to join the family at their home in Hyde Park, New York, to clean up the campaign correspondence. FDR hired LeHand to work for him on Wall Street, where he was the partner in a law firm and worked for a bonding company.[2] After FDR was partially paralyzed in August 1921, LeHand became his daily companion and one of the main people to encourage him to return to politics, with Eleanor and his political strategist Louis McHenry Howe. She remained his secretary when he became governor of New York in 1929 and when he became president in 1933, serving until a 1941 stroke left her partially paralyzed and barely able to speak. She moved to her sister's home in Somerville, Massachusetts, and died after another stroke in 1944.
The exact nature of LeHand's relationship with FDR is debated by historians. It is generally accepted that their relationship contained a romantic element, but scholars remain divided on whether the pair had a sexual relationship. LeHand was romantically involved with William Christian Bullitt Jr., U.S. ambassador to Russia and later France, from 1933 to 1940, but apparently never contemplated marriage to him. Her devotion to the Roosevelt family and dedication to her career were the most likely impediments to marriage, although she once asked a friend: "How could anyone ever come up to FDR?"[3]
- ^ Smith, Kathryn (2016). The Gatekeeper: Missy LeHand, FDR and the Untold Story of the Partnership that Defined a Presidency. New York: Touchstone. p. 9. ISBN 978-15011-1496-0.
In everything but name she was FDR's chief of staff—for the job title was not used by a president until Dwight Eisenhower adopted it to suit his sense of military structure.
- ^ Smith. The Gatekeeper. p. 40.
- ^ Goodwin 1994, pp. 154–55.
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