Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Boettiger

May 3, 1906 — December 1, 1975

Anna Roosevelt was the oldest of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s five children and their only daughter. As a child, Anna loved nothing more than to spend her days under a tree reading a book with her dog beside her, or with her father on horseback exploring nature around their home in Hyde Park in New York’s Hudson River Valley. One afternoon in August 1921 turned her world upside down: her beloved father became paralyzed from the waist down, diagnosed with infantile paralysis, better known as polio. In 1926, Anna married Curtis Dall and had two children. Anna and Curtis later separated, and she moved into the White House with her children. In 1935, she married C. John Boettiger, a journalist for William Randolph Hearst’s anti-Roosevelt Chicago Tribune (!). Anna and John moved to Seattle to run the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where Anna served as editor of the women’s pages and had her third child. When war broke out and John joined the Army, Anna moved back to the White House, where she became a fixture in her father’s world, helped to write the famous D-Day Prayer, and travelled with her father to the Yalta Conference, where she served as his aide.

Photograph: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, public domain