There were a great many Americans, of course, who did not think of him as a war hero, did not feel that they had lost their best friend, and certainly had not regarded him as a daddy. Often their feelings were mixed. One who had fought him bitterly said sadly, “Now we are on our own.” Some were delighted to be on their own. In a Park Avenue hotel elevator, when news of the first flash was being whispered about, the wife of a prominent Wall Street lawyer nervously clutched a glove. She couldn’t wait to get to a radio. Suddenly, directly behind her, a man said aloud, “So he’s finally dead. Isn’t it about time?” The woman turned and lashed her glove across the man’s cheek.
Of all the eulogies, one by Samuel Grafton may have come closest to the feelings of those who would always think of Franklin D. Roosevelt as the President: “One remembers him as a kind of smiling bus driver, with that cigarette holder pointed upward, listening to the uproar from behind as he took the sharp turns. They used to tell him that he had not loaded his vehicle right for all eternity. But he knew he had stacked it well enough to round the next corner, and he knew when the yells were false and when they were real, and he loved the passengers. He is dead now, and the bus is stalled, far from the gates of heaven, while the riders hold each other in deadlock over how to make the next curve.”
***
At 4701 Connecticut Avenue, in a second-floor five-room apartment, twenty-year-old Margaret Truman was dressing for a dinner date when the telephone rang. She remembered afterward that her father’s voice sounded “tight and funny,” but she, with her mind on the exciting evening ahead, said gaily, “Hi, Dad.”
“Let me speak to your mother.”
“Are you coming home for dinner?”
“Let me speak to your mother.”
“I only asked a civil question!”
“Margaret, will you let me speak to your mother?”
Hurt, her eyes damp, the girl returned to her makeup table. Seconds later she glanced up and saw her mother standing in the doorway looking at her—or, as it seemed to Margaret, through her.
“Mother, what’s the matter? What is it?”
Bess Truman answered slowly, “President Roosevelt is dead.”
“Dead!”
Bess was phoning a friend when the doorbell rang. Margaret answered it. A strange woman was standing on the threshold.
“Miss Truman?”
“Yes?”
“I’m from the Associated Press. I would like a—”
Horrified, Margaret realized that she had come to the door in her slip. She slammed the door, and at that instant she comprehended that her days of privacy were over. Looking down from a window, she saw a crowd gathering—newspapermen, photographers, friends, curious onlookers, and, as the apartment manager was discovering, a crowd of applicants for a large, conveniently located $120 a month rent-controlled apartment which was about to be vacated.
***
The widowed First Lady was circling over Fort Benning’s landing strip waiting for her plane to land, and in Atlanta Bill Hassett was buying a coffin at the undertaking firm of H. M. Patterson & Co. Hassett wanted a solid mahogany casket with copper lining, but there were none; all copper was going into the war effort. He then specified that the coffin must be six feet four inches long; Franklin Roosevelt had been a big man. Even that seemed unattainable. The undertaker did have a long mahogany casket, but he had promised it to a New Jersey funeral home. They haggled and bargained until Hassett, a shrewd Vermonter backed by the prestige of the Presidency, got the best coffin in the house. It arrived in Warm Springs at 10:45, accompanied by two hearses. Forty minutes later Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. McIntire, and Steve Early drew up.
Mrs. Roosevelt had long talks with Grace Tully and each of her cousins. Who told her about Lucy Rutherfurd is not known; nevertheless she learned of it then, at the worst possible time. She shook visibly, then composed herself and went into the bedroom. Five minutes later she emerged, grave and solemn but dry-eyed. The time had come to plan the funeral, map its route, choose the service, name the clergymen, select the hymns, and decide who, under protocol, would be entitled to occupy the two hundred seats in the East Room of the White House, where the rites would be held. There were no precedents. Warren G. Harding had been the last chief executive to die in office, and the State Department had just discovered that Harding’s funeral files were missing. Everything would have to be improvised, with the President’s widow as chief improviser.5
A stout bier of thick Georgia pine was installed in the last car of the presidential train and draped with dark green Marine Corps blankets. In the coffin, the lower part of the President’s body was covered by his boat cloak. Mrs. Roosevelt nodded her approval, and a flag was draped over the casket. They had worked through the night, in bright starlight, the air around them thick with the fragrance of honeysuckle. It was 9:25 on the morning of Friday the 13th before the procession moved down the red clay road to the train depot, led by the casket on its caisson and Fort Benning musicians beating muffled drums. Helmeted paratroopers lined both sides of the winding road. Many were white-faced, some faces were tear-stained, and one soldier wobbled as the caisson passed and then collapsed and rolled into a ditch. Graham Jackson, a black accordionist and the President’s favorite musician, played “Going Home.” Military pallbearers carried the coffin into the waiting car, and then, taking advantage of the one-degree grade, the engineer let the train glide silently away. This was to be the four-hundredth and final trip of Roosevelt’s special train. The last two cars had been reversed. Mrs. Roosevelt rode in the “Ferdinand Magellan,” now next to the last. Behind it, in the car FDR had used as an office, lay the coffin on its crude catafalque. Servicemen stood at attention on either side. Elsewhere on the train most blinds were drawn; here they remained up, and the lights over the flag-draped casket were to be left on all night, to permit outsiders to view it.
No one attempted to estimate the number of anonymous mourners camping by the tracks waiting for a glimpse of that casket. In Atlanta they weren’t allowed near it; as the train slowly chugged down the station’s track 9 it passed through an aisle of white-gloved soldiers holding bayoneted rifles at present arms. Nevertheless, the faithful had come; traffic was at a standstill for blocks around, and men and women could be seen on the roofs of garages, warehouses, factories, and tenements, peering down from vast distances while private planes circled overhead. Beyond Atlanta that afternoon silent crowds stood at every grade crossing, and as they were approaching Gainesville, Merriman Smith, in the press car, cried “Look!” and pointed. In the middle of a cotton field a group of black sharecropper women wearing bandannas were kneeling and holding out clasped hands.
At Greenville, South Carolina, the train paused to refuel, change crews, and acquire another American flag, this one fastened across the front of the locomotive by the new engineer. For at least five blocks on either side of the track, packed masses stood wide-eyed. Then a Boy Scout troop started singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” It was “ragged at first,” Merriman Smith later recalled, “but then it spread and swelled. Soon eight or ten thousand voices were singing like an organ.” Heading north in the gathering darkness, Eleanor Roosevelt “lay in my berth all night with the window shade up, looking out at the countryside he had loved and watching the faces of the people at stations, and even at the crossroads, who had come to pay their last tribute all through the night…. I was truly surprised by the people along the way; not only at the stops but at every crossing. I didn’t expect that because I hadn’t thought a thing about it.” She had always liked Millard Lampell’s poem about Lincoln’s death, and now, peering into the night, with Fala at her feet, one quatrain kept running through her mind:
A lonesome train on a lonesome track
Seven coaches painted black
A slow train, a quiet train,
Carrying Lincoln home again….
At 6:20 A.M. on Saturday the train passed through Charlottesville, Virginia. Dawn promised a lovely spring day
; over the forests dogwood spread like a pink mist, and everywhere azaleas and lilacs were in full bloom. Less than four hours later President Truman met the train and the funeral procession began, down Delaware Avenue and turning west on Constitution. Franklin Roosevelt had come this way many times, beaming and waving his campaign fedora to the cheering thousands. They were here again today, more of them than ever, but the stillness was unnatural, broken only when twenty-four Air Corps Liberators passed overhead.
The capital had never seen such panoply before. Helmeted soldiers lined the sidewalks. A squadron of policemen on gleaming motorcycles paced the slow procession. The Navy and Marine bands played Chopin’s “Funeral March,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and the “Dead March” from Saul. A battalion of midshipmen marched. There were tanks, troop carriers, infantry in trucks, detachments of WACs, WAVEs, SPARs (the Coast Guard women), the Liberators overhead again—and then the little black-draped caisson bearing the casket suddenly appeared, led by six white horses and a seventh outrider: eyes hooded, stirrups reversed, sword and boots turned upside down and hanging from the stirrups: the mark of a fallen warrior since the days of Genghis Khan. Arthur Godfrey was describing the event to the nation over live radio; when he saw the caisson his voice broke and he sobbed. “It was so sudden,” Bernard Asbell wrote. “It came so quietly. It seemed so peculiarly small. Just a big-wheeled wagon, dragged slowly, bearing the flag-covered oblong box. It was not a huge thing at all, as somehow everyone expected it to be. It was small, as though it might be any man’s.”
A right turn into Fifteenth Street, a left on Pennsylvania past weeping women—“Oh, he’s gone. He’s gone forever. I loved him so. He’s never coming back”; “Oh Lord, he’s gone, forever and forever and forever”—then through the White House northwest gate and up to the north portico. The Navy Band began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and a spry figure edged away and hurried toward the presidential office—Harry Truman, already on the job. Scarcely anyone noticed him. All eyes were on the doorway as the honor guard carried the coffin inside to the East Room, followed by the President’s widow.
That Saturday afternoon was probably the quietest of the war. Across the country department stores were draped in black. The Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus had canceled its matinee. Movie theaters—seven hundred in New York alone—were closed. Newspapers had finished their runs early, for they were carrying no advertisements this day. Even grocery stores were locked up from two o’clock to five, and at four o’clock, when services began in the East Room, America simply stopped. AP, UP, and INS teletypes slowly tapped out: SILENCE. Buses and automobiles pulled over to curbstones. Trolley cars were motionless. Airplanes in the sky just circled overhead; those that had landed parked on their runways and did not approach terminals. Radios went dead. There was no phone service, not even a dial tone. In New York’s subway tunnels, 505 trains halted where they were, and everywhere you saw men taking off their hats and women sinking to their knees. In that long moment the United States was as still as the two hundred worshippers gathered in the East Room of the Executive Mansion.
The walls in the room were almost obscured by ten-foot banks of lilies, whose cloying scent was overpowering. The congregation forgot to rise when President Truman entered, but almost no one noticed the lapse, not even Truman, and in every other respect the service went well. Roosevelt’s empty wheelchair stood apart from the improvised altar, a mute reminder of the handicap he had overcome. At the widow’s request the guests sang the Navy Hymn (“Eternal Father, strong to save…”) and heard FDR’s favorite passage from his own speeches, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” quoted by Episcopal Bishop Angus Dun in his eulogy. The benediction was said at 4:23 P.M. Mrs. Roosevelt left first, and it was upstairs, in the private apartment of the First Family, that she exchanged bitter words with Anna. Her daughter had served as official hostess when the First Lady was out of town, and when the President had asked Anna whether she felt dinner invitations to “an old friend”—Lucy Rutherfurd—would be proper, Anna had hesitated, knowing the implications, and then assented. Eleanor felt doubly betrayed. Then she rallied. Drying her tears, she descended to the East Room for a last goodbye. An officer opened the coffin for her. She laid a bouquet within, and the coffin was then sealed forever.
At Union Station two trains awaited passengers to Hyde Park: the first for the Roosevelts, the Trumans, the Supreme Court, the cabinet and close friends, the second for congressmen, diplomats, and the press. At 9:30 P.M. the funeral cortege retraced its morning route, past the stiffly erect soldiers and the hushed public mourners on the pavements. Men in public life being what they are, politics was under discussion the moment the train left Washington. In the “Ferdinand Magellan,” Harry Truman was talking earnestly to Jimmy Byrnes and sizing him up as a future Secretary of State, because Byrnes had been at Yalta and had an exact knowledge of the agreements reached there. Harold Ickes was the loudest man in his car, ridiculing Truman and bickering with his own wife. Henry Wallace sat alone, dour and glum. Morgenthau had seen FDR in Warm Springs on Wednesday evening, and he said that although the President’s hand had trembled a trifle more than usual when he poured drinks, he had been as alert and well-informed as ever. Harry Hopkins was telling everyone who would listen that the new President’s name had definitely not been “picked out of a hat” five months ago, that Roosevelt had been watching Truman’s performance for some time and had put him on the ticket because he had led his committee well, was popular, and enjoyed prestige in the Senate, where the peace treaties would be sent for ratification.
***
In the Bronx they paused again. When they left the Mott Haven yards the second train was leading the President’s, and word of the switch was swiftly telegraphed up the Hudson shore to sorrowing New Yorkers waiting there. At daybreak a writer for the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” drew up at the depot in Garrison, New York, a village directly across the river from West Point. He asked the railroad crossing watchman when the President’s car would pass. “Be here between seven-thirty and eight,” the man said. “First there’ll be the train with the congressmen and then, maybe a quarter of an hour later, the President will go through.” A crowd had begun to gather. Among the spectators was a man with a shivering little boy. “You’ve got to remember everything you see today,” the father said. “It’s awfully cold,” said his son.
Presently two or three dozen cars arrived, from Model A Fords to 1942 Cadillacs. The occupants seemed more excited than stricken, and it struck the writer that maybe this was proper, that “Franklin Roosevelt would have preferred to have left his world with more of a bang than a whimper.” As they waited, they gossiped. (“I couldn’t tell old Mrs. Beldon on Friday. The shock would have been too much for her.” “I wish to God he’d managed to hang on until Germany was licked.” “I wish the people would all stand in one place on the platform. It would make a bigger tribute.”) A party of bearded brothers from Glenclyffe Monastery appeared in brown cassocks and sandals; they stood in a line, almost with military precision. A nervous woman said, “It will be just terrible if I don’t see him.” A man assured her, “They’ll slow up when they see us.”
They did. The first train passed, and then the second locomotive crawled past the station, trailing a plume of white smoke. Men took off their hats, as they had eighty years ago when Lincoln’s casket passed here. First a Garrison youth in a red-and-blue-striped mackinaw gave a shout, and then for an instant they all had a clear view of the flag-covered coffin with its military guard of honor.
“I saw him!” a little girl cried. “I saw him real plain!”
“You couldn’t have seen him,” her embarrassed mother said. “He was sleeping under the American flag.” But the child repeated, “I saw him.”
The crowd dissolved slowly, as though uncertain what to do next. As the father and his shivering son left, the boy said, “I saw everything.” The man said, “That’s good. Now make sure you rem
ember it.”
***
Cold Spring, Poughkeepsie, Chelsea, Bacon, Stoneco, New Hamburg—names which would have been increasingly familiar to FDR—passed in succession, and at 8:40 A.M. that Sunday morning the locomotive veered off to a private Hyde Park siding on the edge of the Roosevelt estate. The moment it stopped, a cannon roared. Fifteen seconds later it roared again, and then again and again until the twenty-one-gun salute had been delivered. The West Point Band led the caisson and horses up the steep, wriggling, unpaved road that James Roosevelt had cleared in 1870, a wide trail that James’s son Franklin had always called “the river road.” Along this shore the boy had learned to swim, to row a boat, and, on the sunlit uplands, to ride a horse. Now one horse scrambled up the bank with an empty saddle and reversed harness.
***
The family estate was at the top of the hill. There, behind a ten-foot hedge in the rose garden, the fresh grave had been dug. The plan was for the brief ceremony here; every relative, dignitary, friend, and neighbor was escorted to his place. As the cadet escort presented arms, six servicemen bore the casket into the rose garden. Eleanor Roosevelt walked behind it. A crucifix appeared through a trellis green with woven leaves; the Hyde Park Episcopal vicar led the prayers in a ceremony which, Margaret Truman wrote in her diary that evening, “was simple and very impressive.” Raising his hand as the pallbearers slowly lowered the coffin into the ground, the rector ended:
Now the laborer’s task is o’er;
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 54
