Franklin Delano Roosevelt (right) at the wedding of his daughter Anna (center) to Curtis B. Dall (left), Hyde Park, June 5, 1926 (Photo Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)
By David Kurlander
Over the last ten days, President Trump’s son-in-law, the 39-year-old real estate developer Jared Kushner, has become an increasingly public and criticized face in the fight against coronavirus. On March 30th, The Atlantic reported that Kushner oversaw bungled efforts to build an online COVID-19 testing portal. Then, last Thursday, Kushner appeared during a lengthy White House briefing to discuss his work with FEMA. The New York Times responded with an editorial suggesting that Kushner’s role should make us “dizzy with terror,” while the Guardian argued that he might be “the most dangerous man in the U.S.”
Kushner is part of a long line of presidential sons-and-daughters-in-law who have shaped administrations. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson’s daughter Eleanor married Treasury Secretary William McAdoo at the White House while McAdoo was helping to create the Federal Reserve. Both of LBJ’s sons-in-law, Chuck Robb and Patrick Nugent, served in the war their father-in-law oversaw. Just after George H.W. Bush left office in 1993, his daughter-in-law Laura joined his triumphal (yet harrowing) post-Gulf War trip to Kuwait while George W. stayed behind to prepare for his first gubernatorial run. But the sheer broadness of Kushner’s mandate—from coronavirus, to the Israel-Palestine peace process, to cavalier communications with foreign leaders, to criminal justice reform—begs questions about his perspective: Is he a self-aware actor subtly counteracting Trump’s worst tendencies? Is he a pro-Trump ideologue? Does he have free will in any of this?
Most presidential children-in-law have remained tight-lipped about their balance between political independence and family loyalty. An exception is Curtis B. Dall, FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt’s daughter Anna’s first husband. Dall—a Wall Street banker—went from a trusted member of the Roosevelt clan, to a spurned ex-husband, to an anti-New Deal activist, to a conspiracy theorist. From 1969 to 1982, he chaired the far-right Liberty Lobby, which peddled fringe and often hateful views about Israel, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderberg Group.
Dall animated his spiral into outright political paranoia in an angry 1967 memoir FDR, My Exploited Father in Law, published by Christian Crusade publications. In dishy and non-chronological prose, Dall shared vignettes about the collapse of his relationship with the Roosevelts, offered lengthy (and oddly familiar) screeds against “managed news,” and argued that the Great Depression was orchestrated by Communist-infiltrated “World-Money Powers.” In other words, anything Dall wrote must be taken with a grain of salt. Still, his reflections—particularly when balanced with other sources—powerfully showcase the pitfalls of marrying into executive power.
Dall traveled in the same New York society circles as the Roosevelts. He went to Princeton, served under famed aviator Zachary Lansdowne in France during World War I, and was a celebrated duck hunter. During the heady boom of the early 1920s, he helped establish the Syndicate Department for brothers Herbert and Robert Lehman at their family’s rapidly growing firm, Lehman Brothers.
In December 1924, the 29-year-old Dall met Anna Roosevelt at an Upper East Side Christmas party hosted by Walter Douglas, a railroad boss and member of the dynastic Arizona mining family. Anna was only nineteen and had just started taking agriculture courses at Cornell. According to her son and biographer John Boettinger, Anna admitted that she married Dall “to get away from the constraints of her family, and particularly the tension and feeling of oppressiveness she still associated with her mother and grandmother.”
For his part, Dall largely avoided writing about Anna. Instead, he focused on the exhilaration of entering a family on the political rise. He offered a warm reminiscence about asking FDR—then working in the shiny Equitable Building as Vice-President of insurance firm Fidelity and Deposit Co.—for his daughter’s hand. Roosevelt, who had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the War, realized that they had both watched President Wilson land in Brest while en route to Versailles. Dall also waxed nostalgic about the brushes with legend he experienced as he and Anna built their home in the Hudson Valley, from getting invited by young neighbor Nelson Rockefeller to play the obscure board game Numerica with his grandfather, the legendary John D., to listening to George Gershwin play his newly-completed Rhapsody in Blue at the Warburg family home.
Until the stock market crash of 1929, Dall was willing to value his familial loyalty to the Roosevelts over his growing tendencies toward isolationism and free-market enterprise. Dall became an aide-de-camp of sorts during FDR’s run for the 1928 New York governorship, holding his stoic father-in-law’s arm as he struggled to walk to the podium at fundraisers. When Roosevelt won, Dall accompanied him to Albany to meet outgoing governor and presidential candidate Al Smith.
Tension was building, however, between Dall and Eleanor Roosevelt. After Black Thursday, Mrs. Roosevelt supposedly started throwing more shade at Dall’s line of work. “When the Panic set upon Wall Street…her attitude toward me became quite critical, as though I had personally been responsible for it,” Dall wrote. Of particular contention was a $1,000 investment in common stocks that Dall had facilitated for his brother-in-law, Jimmie Roosevelt, who was then at Harvard. Mrs. Roosevelt demanded Dall return the money to her son, despite the fact that everyone had taken a wallop. Dall did so, but clearly held a grudge.
Beyond the markets, Dall blamed the schism on several emergent Roosevelt advisors—campaigner Louis Howe, legal scholar (and eventual Supreme Court Justice) Felix Frankfurter, and financier Bernard Baruch—who he believed were “working overtime” on radicalizing Mrs. Roosevelt against free enterprise and toward “internationalist” policies. There was an undeniable element of antisemitism present in these charges and many others Dall would later levy. Even as he railed against “political Zionist planners,” he fought against the antisemitism label vociferously, even unsuccessfully bringing a libel case against columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson in the 1960s after they called him such.
In any case, by the time FDR launched his 1932 presidential run, Dall and Anna Roosevelt’s marriage was on the rocks. Neither of them ever publicly commented on the breakup, although letters between Anna and Mrs. Roosevelt suggest a long-standing frustration with Dall’s obsession with business and his negativity toward their politics. In any case, the spouses were sleeping in separate beds by the time Anna began a campaign-trail affair with Clarence John Boettinger, a charismatic newspaperman who she would marry in 1935. Shortly after FDR moved into the White House, he summoned Dall to the Oval Office and let him know that the family lawyer, Harry Hooker, was preparing divorce papers.
Dall did not initially make a fuss about the political elements of his fracture with the Roosevelts. Even at the end of the marriage, he still attended the 1932 Democratic National Convention and claimed to have swayed notorious Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast to support FDR over primary challenger John Rankin. In 1938, he was photographed in LIFE Magazine cavorting with the tacitly anti-FDR Bond Club at their yearly festival in Sleepy Hollow, but was generally viewed as a relative moderate. Ten years later, however, he was openly campaigning for Strom Thurmond and well on his way to the Liberty Lobby.
Curtis Dall was a man whose ideological grievances with his in-laws became his political persona to an almost parodic degree. In other words, he was the antithesis of Jared Kushner, who has shown remarkable impenetrability and a complete public devotion to his father-in-law’s administration. Dall clearly had a different kind of a marriage, a very different presidential patriarch, a more brutal set of bigotries, and a lesser level of restraint than does Jared Kushner. But as Kushner adds the towering challenge of fighting COVID-19 to his full slate of responsibilities, it is hard not to wonder how he sees his role within Trump’s orbit and whether he’s fully able to avoid—even if just in private—the doubts and rebellions that consumed Anna Roosevelt’s first husband.
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