Marguerite Alice "Missy" LeHand was private secretary to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt for 21 years. According to LeHand's biographer Kathryn Smith in The Gatekeeper, she eventually functioned as White House Chief of Staff, the only woman in American history to do so.
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 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 1921, LeHand became his daily companion and one of the main people to encourage him to return to politics, with Eleanor and his political strategist Louis McHenry Howe.