It was sixty five degrees when I left home this afternoon, warm, gray, and still. The world outside my window looked like it had been filmed in black and white, almost sepia tone like a documentary film. The air carried that familiar October calm that always seems to linger over Cambridge, a mood that invites reflection. The clouds hung low, as if the day itself were pausing to remember. It was the kind of day meant for walking, for thinking, for remembering.
I went on a pilgrimage to honor the Roosevelts, Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor, in the city that had shaped them in different ways. Today is October 11, Eleanor Roosevelt’s one hundred forty first birthday, and I wanted to spend the day walking through Cambridge, visiting the places that had formed the family whose legacy of courage, conscience, and public service has long inspired me.
My fascination with the Roosevelts began when PBS re aired the 1994 American Experience documentary FDR around the year 2000.
I was entering my teenage years and was immediately drawn in by the story of this fascinating human being who became one of the most consequential leaders of the twentieth century.
Around the same time, I also saw another American Experience documentary, TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt.
Together, those two films introduced me to the sweep of courage, optimism, and moral purpose that would define both men and later, Eleanor as well.
More than a decade later, on November 18, 2013, I met Joe Wiegand, the historical repriser of President Theodore Roosevelt, at the Framingham Public Library in Massachusetts.
Wiegand had performed at the White House on October 27, 2008, for the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Roosevelt’s birth, an event I had watched on C SPAN as a college student. Meeting him in person deepened my interest in Theodore Roosevelt even further. His energy, humor, and uncanny embodiment of the Rough Rider brought history vividly to life.
Moments like that reminded me that history is not distant; it breathes through people who keep its memory alive.
The following year, in September 2014, I attended the forum for The Roosevelts: An Intimate History at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where Ken Burns and Doris Kearns Goodwin introduced their new series.
I remember sitting in Smith Hall, watching the clips, hearing their voices, and feeling that same spark I had first felt as a teenager. I did not get to meet them that evening, though I had hoped to, but it was the night I realized that the stories I had loved for so long were not only history; they were mirrors for the kind of life I wanted to understand.
And so, more than a decade later, I found myself carrying that same documentary in my backpack, returning to Cambridge to walk in the footsteps of the family whose lives had long ago kindled my fascination.
I boarded the bus at 2:40 p.m., backpack slung over my shoulders with a rain jacket, umbrella, and my The Roosevelts: An Intimate History DVD set tucked safely inside. At 3:02 p.m., the bus stopped at Massachusetts Avenue at Linnaean Street, where my pilgrimage began.
Though I had been to Harvard Square many times before, I had never strayed beyond its familiar corners into this quieter, more residential side of Cambridge. As I walked up the calm stretch of Linnaean Street, determined to fulfill this pilgrimage, I could not help but wonder about the people who live there. What kind of lives do they lead? Do they know that they live in such close proximity to history?
My first stop was Cabot House, once called East House at Radcliffe College.
On May 18, 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt spoke there to a packed audience of students, answering questions about peace, civil rights, and morality. As The Harvard Crimson reported the next morning:
“Often illustrating her points by personal anecdotes, Mrs. Roosevelt urged an attentive audience… to work actively for democracy. ‘If we’re going to be leaders, we have to know about the rest of the world,’ she said, praising the Peace Corps because it gives Americans the chance to learn about the values and problems of other countries.”
Standing outside Cabot Hall, I photographed my DVD in front of the building and thought about her ability to speak plainly and yet lift every conversation toward conscience. The air was cool; the maple leaves trembled slightly in the breeze. I imagined the students who had filled that living room in 1962, listening to a woman whose moral compass never faltered.
From Radcliffe Yard I walked down Garden Street to Christ Church, Episcopal, built in 1761. Here, while attending Harvard, Theodore Roosevelt once taught Sunday School. When Reverend William Spaulding learned that Roosevelt would not convert from the Dutch Reformed faith of his fathers to Episcopalianism, he dismissed him. The twenty year old student accepted the decision without rancor but without compromise.
When I arrived this afternoon, there appeared to be guests gathering for a wedding. The church door was open, the organ faintly audible inside. For a moment, I was tempted to go in, to stand quietly at the back and look for the approximate spot where Theodore might have taught his class more than a century ago. But I knew that photographing my DVD inside the sanctuary, while guests turned in confusion wondering what I was doing, would not have been appropriate. So I remained outside instead, on the stone path shaded by elms.
I stood before the church’s facade and took another photograph of the DVD.
Theodore’s brief conflict here said much about him. Even as an undergraduate, he refused to shape his beliefs to fit expectations. The cloudy sky above Christ Church seemed to echo that stubborn moral light, quiet, unwavering, unshowy, but resolute.
Crossing toward the center of campus, I entered Harvard Yard, where both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt had once walked beneath the same canopy of elms and red brick halls. Theodore arrived in 1876, Franklin in 1900. Decades apart, yet both found here the early shape of ambition, confidence, and public purpose.
Theodore came first, energetic and restless, filling his rooms with books, birds, and snakes, unable to sit still. He boxed, debated, and studied politics with the intensity of a man who already knew life would demand much of him. Years later, his cousin Franklin would follow, equally eager to be noticed but with a smoother charm, “the man with the big, easy smile,” as David McCullough described him.
I raised my DVD and photographed it before the red brick of Matthews Hall.
The soft gray light and autumn leaves seemed to lend the moment a certain stillness despite the crowds of tourists. Cameras clicked and voices rose. Their noise felt out of place in what I had hoped would be a space for quiet reflection. It made me think that arriving early in the morning would have been wiser, before the crowds had spilled into every walkway.
Yet even amid the noise, I could sense the continuity between these two Roosevelts, two men shaped by the same institution but destined to remake it in spirit. Geoffrey C. Ward later reflected,
“They belonged to different parties and overcame different obstacles. But both [Theodore and Franklin] were children of privilege who came to see themselves as champions of the workingman.”
The cousins’ stories, though separated by decades, seemed to converge here, the same walls, the same gates, the same lessons in ambition and empathy.
A short walk brought me to Adams House on Plympton Street, where Franklin Roosevelt once lived as a student. The red brick facade and wrought iron gate shimmered faintly beneath the overcast light. I stood at the entrance and lifted The Roosevelts: An Intimate History DVD for a photograph beneath the gilded crest, then another in front of the doorway marked Adams House.
I had wanted to go inside and see the rooms where Roosevelt stayed, but I was not a student, and I did not want to trespass. I had to settle for staying outside. Still, that small distance between myself and the interior seemed fitting. Franklin Roosevelt had known something of that same separation, wanting to belong yet finding doors closed to him.
It was here, or nearby, that he faced one of the earliest disappointments of his life: rejection from Harvard’s most exclusive social circle, the Porcellian Club. As David McCullough observed,
“Years later, when he was president and the New Deal at high tide, there were those Porcellian members who would call him a traitor to his class.”
This moment, small at the time, may have deepened his sympathy for those excluded from privilege. Adams House, with its quiet courtyards and solemn gates, seemed a fitting symbol of that early struggle, the tension between belonging and independence, between status and purpose.
By five o’clock the light had begun to thin, the last full hour of daylight. I crossed the Charles River to Mount Auburn Cemetery, carrying my familiar backpack. I had come to visit the grave of “Missy,” who “was Marguerite LeHand, Franklin’s secretary, unmarried, Catholic, high school educated, many years younger.”
I had been to Mount Auburn Cemetery before to visit other historical figures laid to rest there, but I had never made time to visit her grave until today. This time was different. I came with purpose, to stand at her resting place and reflect on the role she played in Roosevelt’s life.
I found a map, but her resting place eluded me. The pathways wound through silence and falling leaves. Finally, I called my sister in Western Massachusetts and asked if she could look it up for me. Within minutes she found it online and guided me by phone to the spot.
It felt like a full circle moment. Years ago, I had helped her with a middle school project on Franklin Roosevelt. She had earned an A plus. Now she was the one helping me find this quiet chapter of the same story. There was something quietly fitting about it. I could not finish this pilgrimage alone. Memory, I realized, is never the work of one person but something passed between us in simple acts of care.
Standing at Missy LeHand’s grave, that truth felt especially clear. Her own life had been one long act of care, steady, selfless, and unseen. She had served Roosevelt not for recognition but out of loyalty, friendship, and belief in his cause. In a way, that same spirit lingered here, the quiet strength of those who support, who guide, who remain faithful behind the scenes.
Doris Kearns Goodwin once said:
“Missy had started working for Franklin when she was 20 years old in 1920, and I think fell in love with him and never stopped loving him all the rest of her life. It would be Missy who would sit by his side as they went fishing. She learned every activity that he liked and became an expert at it. So, she was the perfect companion.”
Missy LeHand was more than a secretary. She was indispensable to Roosevelt’s political career and his presidency. She managed his correspondence, organized his schedule, and often acted as a gatekeeper to the Oval Office. More than that, she provided loyalty, steadiness, and friendship during a time when Roosevelt faced immense personal and national challenges.
Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns wrote in The Roosevelts: An Intimate History:
“She had suffered the first of two strokes that would rob her of the power of speech. She was put to bed in her room on the third floor of the White House. Roosevelt was wheeled in every day to visit. She did not improve, was sent to Warm Springs, brought back to the White House, and finally moved back in with her family in Somerville, Massachusetts. As always, Roosevelt did his best to hide his feelings. But he quietly called in his lawyer and changed his will so that, in the event of his death, half of his estate would go and pay for her care. I owed her so much, he told his son James, She served me so well for so long and asked so little in return.”
They continued:
“On Sunday evening, July 30, 1944, in Somerville, Massachusetts, Missy LeHand was taken to the movies. She had suffered two serious strokes three years earlier, but seemed to be improving. Then she saw the newsreel of FDR accepting his party’s nomination aboard his railroad car in San Diego. She had not seen him for nearly a year. He looked like a different man, haggard and ill.
Back home from the theater, Missy leafed through pictures of them both when they were young. That night, she suffered a third stroke. She died the following day.”
I wonder if seeing him in that newsreel was painful for her. For more than two decades she had been his companion, confidante, and caretaker, and now the image before her showed a man visibly worn down by illness and war. It was a stark contrast to the FDR she had once known.
It felt strange to stand there, knowing so much of her story though I never met her. Part of me wished I could tell her how much Franklin cared for her and how he had quietly changed his will to provide for her. Since I cannot, I can at least honor her memory here, remembering the devotion and humanity that shaped Roosevelt’s presidency in ways history too often forgets.
Dusk was falling by the time I returned to Harvard Square. Inside the Harvard Coop, the light was warm against the windows. I found the section on history and biography and pulled a paperback copy of Eleanor by David Michaelis from the shelf. I sat down and began to read.
Then I took out my DVD one last time and photographed it on the staircase beside the large images of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, two faces separated by a generation, now reunited in one frame.
Though it was the American Experience documentary FDR (1994) that first introduced me to Franklin Roosevelt years ago, Ken Burns’s The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014) deepened that fascination and brought the larger story full circle, Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor together. Carrying the DVD through Cambridge felt symbolic, like bringing their shared narrative home to the very ground where so much of it began.
At around 7:22 that evening, I stepped out into the night. The square was glowing with storefront lights and the hum of evening traffic. I went into Harvard Station and saw that my bus was arriving and would leave as soon as the last passenger entered. I did not want to wait another hour for the next bus home, so I raced to the area where I could board and got on just in time.
As the bus carried me home, many thoughts went through my mind. I thought about the people whose lives I had honored today. Franklin Roosevelt, with his resilience and optimism, showed the nation how to face hardship with courage. Eleanor Roosevelt, with her conscience and vision, reminded America that leadership must also mean compassion and justice. Theodore Roosevelt, with his vigor and sense of moral purpose, taught the value of courage in public life. And Missy LeHand, with her quiet devotion, embodied the unseen strength that sustains even the most powerful leaders.
As the bus rolled on, another question came to me. Why had I made this pilgrimage for the Roosevelts at all? I was born forty one years after Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency ended. I never knew any of them, never met anyone who knew them, and I did not live through their times. And yet, I still felt drawn to trace their steps in Cambridge. Perhaps that is the pull of history. Even without firsthand memory, the stories of certain figures reach across time and insist on being remembered. In walking where the Roosevelts once walked, I was not trying to claim their past as my own, but to remind myself that their choices, their leadership, and even their failings continue to echo in the present.
I also thought back to the American Experience documentary FDR, which first introduced me to the world of the Roosevelts. Its narration by David McCullough captured my imagination as a teenager and opened a door into Roosevelt’s world of struggle, courage, and renewal. Years later, in 2015, I had the privilege of meeting McCullough in person, by which time he had already appeared as a commentator in TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and in Ken Burns’s The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.
Meeting him felt like meeting the voice that had first taught me how history could live and breathe. His warmth and insight, whether narrating or reflecting, had always guided me toward seeing the humanity within history. That encounter deepened my appreciation for the way history can be told not merely as facts and dates, but as a living story. His voice guided me into the story of the Roosevelts, and in some ways, it still guides me on days like this, when I step into history’s traces myself.
Each time I revisit those documentaries and see the scenes of Theodore and Franklin at Harvard, I remember that I have walked in their footsteps, not as a student, but as a pilgrim. I have traced the same paths they once took, not with the privileges they carried, but with a sense of wonder and gratitude for the chance to follow. It is humbling to realize that history, which once seemed distant and monumental, can live quietly at the level of one’s own footsteps. The same cobblestones that shaped their beginnings still wait beneath ours, asking only that we pause long enough to remember. You do not have to be admitted to a place to belong to its story. Sometimes it is enough simply to walk, to listen, and to let history meet you halfway.
One day I would also like to visit Oyster Bay, where Theodore lived at Sagamore Hill and is laid to rest at Youngs Memorial Cemetery, and to visit Hyde Park, New York, to spend time exploring the places connected with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, to walk where they lived and worked and to see how their presence shaped that landscape. For now, on this day in Cambridge, as I walked the paths of the Radcliffe Quadrangle at Harvard University, stood before Christ Church, Episcopal, where Theodore once taught Sunday School, crossed Harvard Yard where both cousins walked as students, paused before Adams House where Franklin stayed, and visited Missy LeHand’s resting place at Mount Auburn Cemetery, I felt a little closer to them than ever before. I also felt the weight of both legacy and humanity, how their public greatness was intertwined with private struggle, and how even their flaws became part of the story that made them who they were.
Sometimes I found myself wrestling with this paradox, the greatness of their leadership alongside the imperfections of their character. Theodore’s fiery idealism, Franklin’s boundless confidence, Eleanor’s tireless conscience, each of them had faults as well as virtues, yet together they shaped an enduring vision of service, courage, and moral growth.
And yet, perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt herself provides the clearest way to hold both truths at once. It seems fitting to let her have the last word, since it is also her birthday:
“All human beings have failings; all human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another’s failings; but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.”
