Goodbye to a Lady

In the gray rain at Hyde Park on Nov. 10, 1962, Gore Vidal attended the funeral of Eleanor Roosevelt. “This was one of the rare occasions on which he wanted to pay his last respects in the traditional way…”

“As he drove through the heavy traffic, the crowds were almost impenetrable. The rain kept falling. For him it was a dismal, funereal day filled with thoughts about the death of a great American who had been a friend to both his father and to him. He ‘stood alongside the thirty-third, the thirty-fourth, the thirty-fifth and the thirty-sixth presidents of the United States, not to mention all the remaining figures of the Roosevelt era who had assembled for the funeral… She was like no one else in her usefulness. As the box containing her went by me, I thought, well, that’s it. We’re really on our own now.’”

— “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan