Margaret Suckley; Presidential Aide Gave ‘Fala’ to F. D. R.

Margaret L. Suckley, the World War II aide to her cousin President Franklin D. Roosevelt who gave Roosevelt the little Scottish terrier that enchanted the nation, is dead.

Miss Suckley, the longtime archivist at the Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park, N.Y., was 99 when she died Saturday at her home in Rhinebeck, N.Y., near the library.

A distant cousin and neighbor of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, she spent her life in the home her grandfather built in 1852.

Miss Suckley, who never married, raised Scottish terriers and in 1940 gave the President one. He named it Fala and thereafter referred to “my little dog, Fala,” in many of his fireside chats to the nation.

Midway through World War II, Republicans charged that the Navy had been forced to send a ship to the Aleutian Islands to retrieve the dog, who had been left after a Presidential visit.

Roosevelt turned the controversy into a political plus, however, when he mocked Republicans for stooping to attack “even my little dog, Fala.”

Miss Suckley, who was with Roosevelt at Warm Springs, Ga., when he was stricken with a fatal cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, retired from the Roosevelt Library in 1963.

She was the last of seven brothers and sisters descended from the prominent Livingston and Beekman families of 17th- and 18th-Century America.