Margaret Suckley

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Margaret Suckley was a close friend and confidant of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as archivist at the first American presidential library ^[1]. Generally called 'Daisy' by those who knew her, she was born December 20, 1891^[2] at Wilderstein in the Hudson Valley, and died June 29, 1991^[3] in Rhinebeck, New York ^[4], after living to nearly 100 years old. She was a neighbor and sixth cousin ^[5] of President Roosevelt. She was one of the four women with Roosevelt in his house, the Little White House, in Warm Springs, Georgia, when he died of cerebral hemorrhage in 1945. The exact nature of their relationship is unknown, however, there is considerable evidence that their relationship was at least intellectually, if not physically, intimate. Her relationship with Roosevelt was the subject of a book ^[6] and numerous newspaper articles ^[7] ^[8] ^[9] based on the discovery after her death of thousands of pages of notes, diary entries, and letters in a black suitcase under her bed ^[1]. She gave Roosevelt his dog Fala, and wrote a children's book on the dog ^[10].

During World War II, Daisy often stayed for long visits at the White House, keeping the President company on quiet evenings. The only two published photographs of him in his wheelchair were taken by Miss Suckley. Yet she seems to have been routinely dismissed, even by many historians, as the dowdy cousin who worked on the family papers.

Miss Suckley was not considered to be very beautiful, and she often referred to herself as "playing the part of the prim spinster," however, notably romantic overtones are found in many of the letters written to her by FDR. Though Roosevelt was known to have participated in affairs with several women during his marriage, there is little documentation of the nature of his relationship with Margaret Suckley, and Roosevelt’s apparent instructions to Miss Stuckley to burn at least some of the letters he wrote to her have resulted in gaps

"There is no reason why I should not tell you that I miss you very much — It was a week ago yesterday," Roosevelt wrote her after spending time with her on one occasion, during a retreat to his 'Top Cottage' on his New York estate near the Hudson River. "I have longed to have you with me," he wrote another time from a cruise to Panama.

Other letters clearly show Roosevelt ruminating about his personal and political experiences, including commentary that he wrote to her regarding the progress of World War II and meetings that he had during the war, such as with Churchill and Stalin at the Yalta Conference.

"He told me once," she wrote in her diary soon after his death, "that there was no one else with whom he could be so completely himself."

After Roosevelt died, his daughter, Anna, and a friend came upon a cache of Daisy’s letters, hidden in the box from his stamp collection that Roosevelt took everywhere with him. There is no indication that Anna read the letters or understood their significance, but she offered to let Daisy have them back, and Daisy accepted carefully. She supposed, she wrote to Anna, it had been "just easier" for him "to toss them into the stamp box rather than bother to tear them up & drop them into the waste-paper basket!"