Dear Franklin, 

We are deeply concerned about your sickness, and trust you will soon be well. We are very proud of you. 

With love, 

Aff. Yours 

Theodore Roosevelt 

It was during Franklin’s convalescence at home that his wife Eleanor, when she unpacked his luggage upon his return from Europe, discovered love letters from Lucy Mercer, who was the other woman in her husband’s life. Before the war, Mercer had served in the Roosevelt household as Eleanor’s social secretary. Eleanor had even considered Lucy a close friend. After the war’s outbreak, Lucy left service with Eleanor and joined the Navy. At the Navy Department, she received an assignment to work as a personal assistant to Franklin. 

In finding the letters, not only did Eleanor uncover the affair, but she also soon discovered that many in their social circle knew about her husband’s infidelities while she had been in the dark. The prominent Washington socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s outspoken daughter and Eleanor’s cousin, knew of the affair, even encouraged it, and spread the story in the nation’s capital. (Alice, known for her malicious wit, is reputed to have said that Franklin “deserved a good time. . . . He was married to Eleanor.”) 

Shamed and angered by these discoveries, Eleanor offered her husband a divorce. Roosevelt’s mother and his political handlers made clear to him, however, that divorce was out of the question because it would likely ruin his chances for a successful career in politics. While Roosevelt recovered from the flu and his marriage survived, Eleanor would never forget her husband’s betrayal and her humiliation. 

The influenza pandemic continued on its killing rampage around the world, even as the armistice brought an end to the fighting on the Western Front on November 11, 1918. In Paris during the first half of 1919, the flu infected the negotiations taking place to write the peace treaties that would bring a formal end to the war. Leaders and their staffs suffered under illness while the negotiations dragged on. One casualty of the flu was Sir Mark Sykes, the soldier and diplomat best known today for having worked up the Sykes-Picot agreement to partition the Middle East among the victorious powers. Sykes, only thirty-nine years of age, died in his hotel room in Paris where he formed part of the British negotiating team. 

President Woodrow Wilson became seriously ill when he came down with the flu at the beginning of April. Wilson’s doctor, Cary Grayson recorded that the president was “seized with violent paroxysms of coughing, which were so severe and frequent that it interfered with his breathing.” Wilson’s fever spiked to over 103, and Grayson feared for the President’s life. His wife Edith recorded that he suffered from a burning fever that incapacitated him, and she “was dreadfully alarmed.” 

When hit by the flu, the sixty-two-year-old president was engaged in diplomatic battles with the French, Italians, and Japanese over the peace treaties. In particular, Wilson labored in tough negotiations with France’s Prime Minister George Clemenceau, the two leaders disputing the terms of the peace treaty with Germany. The American delegation believed that Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Italy’s Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando would seek to take advantage of the President’s illness in these trying negotiations. For several days, Wilson was too ill to take part in discussions. Wilson’s wife Edith recorded: “He was too ill to rise from his bed. However, things were at such a crisis that he could not relax his personal hold.” She wrote adoringly about her husband that “the spirit was stronger than the flesh.” Once he started to recover, Wilson insisted on working from his hotel suite. He requested that “unless Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Orlando were afraid of the disease,” the negotiations should continue, taking place in his bedroom. To what extent Wilson’s illness affected his judgment in the final stages of negotiating the peace treaty with Germany remains disputed by historians. His staff, however, saw a marked change in the president's behavior. One aide thought “something queer was happening in his mind. One thing was certain: he was never the same.” 

If the flu had not hit Wilson in Paris, would he have fought harder to make the Treaty of Versailles more conciliatory toward Germany? Would more moderate terms in the treaty have reconciled the German people and their leaders to their defeat? We cannot know the answers to these questions. In light of Germany’s actions during the war, the Treaty of Versailles was not unduly harsh. After all, Germany had started the war by invading Belgium and France in response to a breakdown of the peace in the Balkans. The German occupation of conquered territories also had inflicted immense damage on them. In addition, the Treaty of Versailles reflected to a remarkable degree Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which he proclaimed would provide the basis for an enduring peace. The Fourteen Points called for Germany to lose territory and pay reparations. Furthermore, the victorious powers were justified and bound to limit the German armed forces so that Germany could not carry out offensive operations by land or by sea for the foreseeable future. A stable peace required that Germany not possess the power to wage future wars of aggression. For all its flaws, the Versailles settlement did not make inevitable another world war: a Great Depression leading to a vicious nationalist extremist movement seizing power in Germany were needed to bring on the next European conflagration. There was nothing inevitable about either the Great Depression or Hitler’s seizure of power coming to pass. The impact of the flu on Wilson’s judgment in negotiations thus was not as great as sometimes alleged. 

During the second half of 1919, when Wilson’s health collapsed, crippled by strokes, the impact on his judgment is more readily apparent. The breakdown in Wilson’s health ruined whatever hope he had of convincing the American people and their elected representatives in the Senate to ratify the peace treaty that he had negotiated in Paris. If Wilson’s health had held up, perhaps he might have proven more willing to compromise with political opponents at home, leading the United States to join the League of Nations and to underwrite European security. The strokes that crippled Wilson, more than influenza, wrecked his vision for America playing a greater role in world affairs. 

One prominent leader who managed to escape from the influenza pandemic was none other than Winston Churchill, Roosevelt’s future coalition partner in the next world war. Influenza was all around Churchill. As minister of munitions in the British government, he was a close political ally of Lloyd George when he came down with the flu in the autumn of 1918. In addition, Churchill attended the same dinner that summer in London where he and Franklin D. Roosevelt met for the first time. Those serving in a high office near Churchill, too, came down with the flu. In February 1919, the flu struck Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, who Churchill had selected to serve as the Royal Air Force’s chief of staff. Trenchard felt so ill that he tendered his resignation to Churchill, who at the war’s end had moved to serve in the British government as the civilian head of the Royal Air Force. Churchill refused the resignation offer, but it took almost two months before Trenchard was well enough to take up his duties as air force chief of staff. 

Influenza would strike even closer to Churchill when his own family became ill on no fewer than two separate occasions. Influenza first afflicted his household in March 1919, while Churchill was in France taking part in the peacemaking deliberations in Paris. His wife Clementine wrote to him: “I’m afraid I am in for influenza. My temperature this morning is 102.” Poor Clementine could not find a doctor to attend to the Churchill family because physicians and nurses were overextended treating so many people being sick at that time. The Churchill children’s nanny by the name of Isabel also was stricken by the flu. The nanny became delirious with fever and attempted to take Churchill’s youngest daughter Marigold, then only a few months old, into her bed. Clementine had to rescue the infant and keep her away from the fevered nanny. Clementine wrote to her husband that Isabel “talked fast & loud in an unearthly voice like a chant for several hours.” Despite Clementine’s best efforts to nurse the nanny, she died. Of the next few days, an ill Clementine fretted that her baby daughter might have caught the flu. Clementine wrote to Churchill: “I am unhappy.” When Churchill returned from France, he stayed away from the stricken household to avoid exposure to the contagion. 

The Churchill family would yet again come down with a flu-like ailment right after Christmas in December 1921. Once more, Clementine needed to cope with the emergency without her husband. This time, he was away in Cannes in the south of France, working hard at writing The World Crisis, his autobiographical history of the First World War. The day after he left for France, his family became ill. All three of the children had high fevers. Only four months earlier Winston and Clementine had lost their youngest child Marigold. The infant Marigold had survived the influenza pandemic, but she became ill with a sore throat that became infected during the summer of 1921. Poor Marigold passed away with both her distraught parents at her bedside. This recent sad loss of their youngest child must have weighed heavily on Clementine’s mind as her older children became sick. A determined Clementine quickly arranged for a doctor to visit and for two nurses to come and live in the home to provide full-time medical care for the family. In a long letter, Clementine detailed to her husband the efforts she made to protect their children. She sought to reassure him, for him not to be anxious because she and the children were being well looked after. “It is providential you went away as it would have been most annoying if you had caught it.” She wrote: “I do hope you are having a delicious time.” Clementine sick at home could only dream of the south of France.