Malvina Thompson

Malvina "Tommy" Thompson (1893 - April 12, 1953) was a private secretary and personal aide to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a pioneer of the East Wing staff, being the first staffer for a First Lady of the United States who was not a social secretary.

Thompson was born in New York City in 1893. A high school graduate, she later became a self-taught office secretary, working first for the American Red Cross during the intense years of World War I and the 1918 influenza epidemic, and then for the New York State Democratic Committee. In these roles, she began to work with Democratic Party activist Louis McHenry Howe and Howe's friend, Eleanor Roosevelt. During the campaign of Eleanor's husband Franklin D. Roosevelt for Governor of New York, Thompson became Eleanor's personal secretary. Eleanor's daughter Anna Eleanor Roosevelt soon nicknamed her "Tommy". Franklin won the election, and Eleanor became the First Lady of New York. As Franklin had been left partially paralyzed by polio, Eleanor had to perform much of the travel and meet-and-greet duties of the Office of the Governor, and Thompson accompanied her.

"Tommy" soon became an integral part of Eleanor Roosevelt's staff. Her formal role was that of Roosevelt's scheduler, personal travel assistant, and office secretary. The First Lady relied upon Thompson to cut off her own tendencies to be sympathetic and over-generous to petitioners.

When the Roosevelts moved to the White House in March 1933, "Tommy" continued and intensified her role. Roosevelt and Thompson began operating nationwide to encourage and inspect the divisions and departments performing New Deal relief, traveling as much as 40,000 miles (65,000 km) per year. Continuing to serve as Roosevelt's personal assistant and scheduler, Thompson also took on the pioneering role of First Lady press secretary, organizing and overseeing Roosevelt's all-female press conferences and her syndicated daily newspaper column, My Day. In 1940, she strongly discouraged Roosevelt from addressing the Democratic National Convention, which no First Lady had ever done; she later told Lorena Hickok, "I did not want to see Mrs. Roosevelt sacrificed on the altar of hysteria." Roosevelt spoke at the convention nonetheless, and her speech was widely regarded as a "triumph".

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