Marguerite LeHand

Uncommon card · No. 134470

Marguerite Alice "Missy" LeHand (September 13, 1896 – July 31, 1944) was a private secretary to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt for 21 years. According to LeHand's biographer Kathryn Smith in The Gatekeeper, LeHand eventually functioned as the de facto White House Chief of Staff, the first woman in American history to do so, though the position was not formally created until 1946 after LeHand and Roosevelt were both dead. Born into a blue collar, Irish-American family in upstate New York, LeHand studied secretarial science in high school, took a series of clerical jobs, and began to work for the Franklin Roosevelt 1920 vice presidential campaign in New York. Following the Democrats' defeat, FDR's wife, Eleanor, invited her to join the family at their home in Hyde Park, New York, to clean up the campaign correspondence. FDR hired LeHand to work for him on Wall Street, where he was the partner in a law firm and worked for a bonding company. After FDR was partially paralyzed in August...

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