Hillary Clinton’s historic run for the presidency as the first serious female contender for that office has on occasion brought up the memory of past pioneers who ran even though there was not the slightest chance of their succeeding, such as Susan B. Anthony and Shirley Chisholm.
Yet what if Mrs. Clinton had not been the first? What if an American woman of world-renown had entered the lists for the world’s highest office as long ago as the early days of the Cold War, with some hope of winning the election?
That possibility constitutes the plot of Robin Gerber’s new historical fantasy novel “Eleanor vs. Ike,” which was published in January by HarperCollins and is about a hypothetical presidential race between Eleanor Roosevelt and Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower in 1952. The author gave a talk, book signing and reception to promote her work at the Henry A. Wallace Center at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library and Home on the evening of Thursday, March 13, in an event which also served as a benefit for the Catharine Street Community Center in Poughkeepsie.
“The idea came to me in the summer of 2006, when there was rising talk of Hillary Clinton running for president,” Gerber said. “I asked myself, how could I write an historically appropriate nonfiction book? Then one day, it hit me. ‘Damn it,’ I said, ‘If she didn’t run, I’m going to make her run!’ So welcome to my fantasy.”
Gerber, a first-time novelist who is the author of nonfiction studies of Eleanor Roosevelt and Katharine Graham, took pains to insist that her imagined scenario is not total fantasy – there had been, on more than one occasion, suggestions that Mrs. Roosevelt run for president. Louis Howe, FDR’s brilliant campaign manager early in his career, told her in 1935, “Eleanor, if you’re going to run for president in 1940, tell me now so I can get ready,” and there was a serious “Draft Eleanor” movement at a time when President Harry Truman was experiencing serious difficulties during the 1948 campaign. But the “First Lady of the World” resisted all such appeals.
Why didn’t Eleanor Roosevelt run in real life?
“She gave such stock answers as, ‘The country isn’t ready for a woman president,’ and ‘I would be beholden to the Democratic Party,’” Gerber said. “Well, the country wasn’t ready for much of what she did; that never stopped her. She was never beholden to the party as First Lady, and she wouldn’t have been as president. The truth lay in her insecurity – she was a person who had suffered a lot of terrible rejection in her life, beginning with a cold mother and alcoholic father, who were both dead by the time she was 10. As it turned out, Hillary showed more courage than Eleanor did.”
Following the storyline
In the novel Eleanor is drafted at the Democratic Convention after the actual candidate that year, Adlai Stevenson, drops dead of a heart attack while walking up to the podium to accept the nomination, a melodramatic turn which Gerber justifies on the basis of the fact that he did indeed die in that manner at an airport in 1965. Other dramatic incidents in the book include an assassination attempt on Eleanor by the Ku Klux Klan, an Eleanor vs. Ike television debate moderated by Walter Cronkite and a scene where Hillary Clinton as a little girl is introduced to the person who in this alternate historical world was the first female Democratic Party nominee for president. Yet there is one final plot twist – which Gerber refused to reveal to her listeners.
“I’m not going to tell you who wins,” she laughed.
“1952 seemed like a heck of a good year to set the novel in,” the author said. “It was the last time the Democrats had a brokered convention, one that went into more than one ballot. And there are other parallels. Then as now the country is mired in a terrible war – Korea and Iraq. Then as now there was a great fear of foreign incursions – communists and terrorists. Then as now there were challenges to civil liberties – McCarthyism and Bush’s anti-terror legislation. And likewise there is so much uncertainty about so many things, not least in politics. Remember, Stevenson did not run in the primaries – he was drafted at the convention. We should all keep in mind that this could happen again, in the case of a deadlock.”
Jokingly referring to one of Mrs. Clinton’s most derided statements, Gerber told the audience, “Yes, I do talk to Eleanor Roosevelt, and since I’m not running for president, I can say that. But I do understand how Hillary could say that, since Eleanor left so much writing, so many of her own words. If you spend a lot of time reading them, you do feel like you are talking to her. But I suppose writing books will also do that for you.”
The author said she gave her novel to Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser in Washington a few weeks ago, and added, “I hope she won’t have time to read it for a long time. Yes, I’m supporting her.”
Since Gerber had restricted her remarks to presidential campaigns past and present, real and imagined, the Dutchess Beat felt compelled to ask her what an Eleanor Roosevelt presidency in the 1950s would have meant for the United States and the world.
“It would have meant that civil rights would have come a decade earlier,” she answered. “And there would have been better relations with the countries we’re having trouble with now: Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Middle East. In 1952 Eleanor did in fact make a tour of those areas, which resulted in her book, “India and the Awakening East.” She commented at the time, ‘We really don’t understand those people in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and India,’ and we still don’t – and need to.”