Alice Roosevelt Longworth - Political Connections

Political Connections

From an early age, Longworth was interested in politics. When advancing age and illness incapacitated her Aunt Bamie, Longworth stepped into her place as an unofficial political adviser to her father. Longworth warned her father against challenging the renomination of William Howard Taft in 1912. She took a hard-line view of the Democrats and in her youth sympathized with the conservative wing of the Republican Party. She supported her half-brother, Ted Roosevelt, when he ran for governor of New York in 1924. When Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, Longworth publicly opposed his candidacy. Writing in the Ladies' Home Journal in October 1932, she said of FDR, "He is my father's fourth cousin once removed.... Politically, his branch of the family and ours have always been in different camps, and the same surname is about all we have in common.... I am a Republican.... I am going to vote for Hoover.... If I were not a Republican, I would still vote for Mr. Hoover this time."

Although she did not support John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, she became very enamored of the Kennedy family and "learned how amusing and attractive Democrats could be." She developed an affectionate, although sometimes strained, friendship with Bobby Kennedy, perhaps because of his relatively thin skin. When she privately made fun of his scaling the newly named Mount Kennedy in Canada, he was not amused. She even admitted to voting for President Lyndon Johnson over Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 because she believed Goldwater was too mean.

Longworth developed a genuine friendship with Richard Nixon when he was vice president, and when he returned to California after Eisenhower's second term, Longworth kept in touch and did not consider his political career to be over. She encouraged Nixon to reenter politics and continued to invite him to her famous dinners. Nixon returned these favors by inviting Longworth to his first formal White House dinner and to the 1971 wedding of his daughter Tricia Nixon.