Alice Roosevelt Longworth - Later Life

Later Life

By the 1950s, Longworth's health began to fail her. In 1955, she fell and suffered a broken hip. In 1956, Longworth was found to be suffering from breast cancer, and though she successfully underwent a mastectomy at the time, she was found to have cancer in the other breast in 1970, requiring a second mastectomy. Taking the medical procedures in stride, she referred to herself as the only "topless octogenarian" in Washington. After these surgeries, Longworth's health was not as good as it once had been, but she continued a rigorous schedule and maintained her social rounds. By 1960, at age 76, after a noticeable loss of weight and frail appearance and with a continued cough and shortness of breath, Longworth was advised by family and friends to see a physician. She was diagnosed with emphysema as a result of many years of heavy smoking.

Longworth was a lifelong member of the Republican party. Yet her political sympathies began to change when she became close to the Kennedy family and Lyndon Johnson. She voted Democratic in 1964 and was known to be supporting Bobby Kennedy in the 1968 Democratic primary.

It is possible her change in political leanings was the result of the social upheavals occurring in American society at the same time. Beginning in the late 1950s and continuing into the 1970s, the struggle of African-Americans for social and legal equality could not have escaped the notice of a woman always known for approaching everyone she first met with respect, without regard for station in life. As an example of her attitudes on race, in 1965 her African-American chauffeur and one of her best friends, Turner, was driving Longworth to an appointment. During the trip, he pulled out in front of a taxi, and the driver got out and demanded to know of him, "What do you think you're doing, you black bastard?" Turner took the insult calmly, but Longworth did not and told the taxi driver, "He's taking me to my destination, you white son of a bitch!"

After RFK was murdered in 1968, she again supported her friend Richard Nixon, just as she had done in his 1960 campaign against JFK. Her long friendship with Nixon ended at the conclusion of the Watergate Scandal, specifically when Nixon quoted her father's diary at his resignation, saying, "Only if you've been to the lowest valley can you know how great it is to be on the highest mountain top." This infuriated Longworth, who spat curse words at her television screen as she watched him compare his early departure from the White House (in the face of probable impeachment and possible criminal prosecution) to her idealistic young father's loss of his wife and mother on the same day due to illness. Nixon, however, called her "the most interesting " and said, "No one, no matter how famous, could ever outshine her."

She remained cordial with Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, but a perceived lack of social grace on the part of Jimmy Carter caused her to decline to ever meet him, the last sitting president in her lifetime. In the official statement marking her death, President Carter wrote "She had style, she had grace, and she had a sense of humor that kept generations of political newcomers to Washington wondering which was worse—to be skewered by her wit or to ignored by her."

Longworth's last public appearance, televised nationwide on PBS, was on the 1976 bicentennial of the United States, attended by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. Joseph Alsop and other friends were taken aback when Longworth came on the screen, escorted to the head of the receiving line by her granddaughter's close friend Robert Hellman. She had her own reception line later, greeting old friends of many years for the last time—including some old-timers from the White House kitchen staff, most of whom were African-Americans.

After many years of ill health, Longworth died in her Embassy Row home in 1980 of emphysema and pneumonia, with contributory effects of a number of other chronic illnesses. She was 96. Alice Roosevelt Longworth is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.

Of her quotable quotations, her most famous found its way to a pillow on her settee: "If you haven't got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me." To Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had jokingly remarked at a party, "Here's my blind date. I am going to call you Alice," she responded acidly, "Senator McCarthy, you are not going to call me Alice. The trashman and the policeman on my block call me Alice, but you may not." She informed President Lyndon B. Johnson that she wore wide-brimmed hats so he couldn't kiss her. On another occasion, asked by a Ku Klux Klansman in full regalia to take his word for something, she refused, saying, "I never trust a man under sheets." And when a well-known Washington senator was discovered to have been having an affair with a young woman less than half his age, Mrs. Longworth quipped, "You can't make a soufflé rise twice."

Though Longworth was Theodore Roosevelt's firstborn child, she was the last of his children to die, surviving all five of her half-siblings from her father's second marriage.