Transcript: Chapter 06

Narrator: When America entered World War I, the Navy sent Franklin on an inspection tour of the western front. He reviewed the troops, toured the battlefields, and got as close to the fighting as the military would allow him. As he was about to sail back to America, he was struck down by a strain of influenza and brought home severely ill.

Franklin was 36 years old. He had handsome children, a dutiful wife, a famous name, and a rising career. As Eleanor unpacked his suitcase, she accidentally made a discovery that would change their lives forever -- a packet of love letters to her husband. Lucy Page Mercer was Eleanor's own social secretary. She was a refined young woman from an old Southern Catholic family.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Lucy was tall and statuesque. She had a face, people say, that belonged in drawing rooms. She had a charm that was rivaled only by Franklin's charm. One thinks of Franklin in those days -- and indeed throughout his life -- as this incorrigible flirt. Flirting was a part of his vitality, his magnetism, his charm. He loved to conquer women in conversation, so that's probably how it started with Lucy, but then I do think it became something more.

Narrator: While Eleanor was away at Campobello, Franklin spent time with Lucy alone and even appeared with her at dinner parties. He had fallen in love.

Blanche Wiesen Cook: Eleanor Roosevelt really had a very romantic idea that she could have a perfect marriage, that they would love and trust and respect each other and be partners in love the way her parents never were, which is, I think, why her discovery of the Lucy Mercer affair was so devastating to her.

Narrator: "The bottom dropped out of my own particular world," Eleanor confided to a friend, "and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world honestly for the first time."

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Eleanor's immediate response was not only to confront Franklin, but from what we seem to understand, to offer him a divorce -- "If this is what you want, go."

Edna Gurewitsch: Mr. Roosevelt knew that his mother would withdraw all financial help -- she'd threatened him with that -- he would lose his family life and it really meant giving up his political ambitions, and that was something he had to think over more than once.

Narrator: Franklin would have to choose between his love for Lucy Mercer and his political career, family and Eleanor.

Edna Gurewitsch: And he finally decided to stay married and to try to make the best of the marriage. And Mrs. Roosevelt's condition was that he never see Lucy Mercer again.

Narrator: "After everyone had their say," James later wrote, "Father and Mother sat down and agreed to go on for the sake of appearances." Eleanor and Franklin would live together but never again share the intimacies of married life. Devastated, Eleanor went time and again to Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery. For hours she sat gazing at a monument to a woman who had killed herself. All her childhood fears had been confirmed. Those she loved most -- first her father, now her husband -- would always desert her. Nothing lasted.

Edna Gurewitsch: It was a marked turning point in her life. She had no persona, she felt destroyed. She'd have to make a life for herself, and that's what she did.

Narrator: The surprise of the 1920 Democratic Convention was the nomination for vice president. "The young man I am going to suggest," the speaker said, "has a name to be conjured with in American politics." Franklin Delano Roosevelt was 38, one of the youngest vice presidential candidates in American history. His cousin Theodore had been 42 in this point in his career. Franklin was now ahead of schedule.

As the campaign got under way, he threw open his mother's Hyde Park home for a party rally. Sarah was proud, but appalled when 5,000 loyal Democrats trampled her lawn and invaded her stately home.

Vice presidential candidates usually ran modest campaigns, but Franklin barnstormed more than 8,000 miles through 20 states in 18 days. "During the three months in the year 1920," he said, "I got to know the country as only a candidate for office or a traveling salesman can get to know it."

Franklin pressed Eleanor to accompany him on the campaign. Reluctantly she went along and hated every minute of it -- the smoke-filled rooms, the late-night card games, the hard-drinking politicians and reporters. Ever since her discovery of her husband's affair, she'd been cautiously embracing a life of her own.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Before Lucy came into their lives, my own sense is that Eleanor was not happy simply as a wife and a mother, but she had no outlet for her energy. She had torrential energy and there was no outlet for it because in that day and age, it wasn't legitimate for a woman to have a career outside the home.

Curtis Roosevelt: The affair with Lucy Mercer enabled her to see herself in perhaps a different light, and I personally believe that FDR's affair with Lucy Mercer enabled my grandmother to open a door and walk out.

Blanche Wiesen Cook: She meets with all of these political women -- they were suffragists, they were progressives -- they are dedicated to making things better for most people.

Edna Gurewitsch: They were women who knew things, who could educate her, who could teach her parliamentary law, who could tell her about the labor movement, labor unions and so on. It also was slightly rebellious of her. She was breaking bounds.

Narrator: Eleanor was moving into a vanguard of women who were political activists. In 1920, women were voting in their first national election, and Franklin, never missing a political beat, was ardently courting their vote. He loved every minute of the 1920 campaign, but when an aide asked him if he thought he would be elected, he replied, "Nary an illusion."

For the Democrats, the election was a disaster. For the Republicans, the victory, one observer said, "was more than a landslide, it was an earthquake." But for Franklin, the campaign was a triumph. Americans all across the country now knew his name. He had met and won the good will of thousands of party leaders. He stood ready to aim higher than the vice presidency next time. At 38, he was young, strong, energetic and impatient.

In the summer of 1921, he visited a Boy Scout camp serving city children. He enjoyed himself immensely, posing for pictures for the newspapers and joking with the boys. This is the last photograph of Franklin Roosevelt standing on his own two feet.

When he said goodbye, he took with him the good will of the campers and a mysterious, undetected virus already multiplying and circulating throughout his body.

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