Grace Tully was born on August 9, 1900 in Bayonne, New Jersey, the daughter of a Staten Island businessman and Democratic Party loyalist. She trained to be a secretary at the prominent Grace Institute in New York City. Her first job was working for the New York City Catholic Archdiocese as a secretary to Bishop and later Cardinal Patrick Hayes.

In 1928, Tully first went to work for the man who would be her boss for nearly two decades. She began work for the Democratic Party that year and was assigned to Eleanor Roosevelt’s secretarial staff. At the time, Franklin Roosevelt was making his run for the New York Governorship. He was elected, and when he took office in Albany, Tully was there, serving as personal secretary Marguerite LeHand’s assistant. She took over for LeHand when she fell ill in 1941. Tully served as FDR’s personal secretary until his death in April 1945. She was with him, in fact, in Warm Springs, Georgia on the day he suffered his fatal cerebral hemorrhage.

Tully’s dedication to her boss continued after his death, when she served as the FDR Foundation’s executive secretary. She published her memoirs, FDR: My Boss, in 1949. The account was a personal, behind-the-scenes look at his Presidency. She focused on the many ways in which FDR made his staff feel like part of his family. When she was working late, for example, an extra seat at the dinner table would often be made available for her. Her book also recounts the more serious moments of his Presidency. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, FDR called Tully in to dictate an address he was to give to Congress the following day. The address she took down and transcribed would eventually be perhaps FDR’s most famous speech, asking for a declaration of war and beginning with the words: “Yesterday, December 7—a day which will live in infamy—the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

In 1955, Tully was named secretary to Lyndon Johnson and, later, Mike Mansfield during their respective tenures as heads of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. She retired ten years later, living out the rest of her life in Washington, D.C. She died in 1984.

Photograph of Tully with FDR Courtesy FDR Presidential Library Digital Archives