The Allies

by Winston Groom

  * * *

  WHEN ROOSEVELT ARRIVED AT YALTA in February 1945 many people commented on his sallow appearance, including Churchill’s doctor Lord Moran, who diagnosed advanced hardening of the arteries of the brain and gave the American president only a few months to live. As leader of the discussions Roosevelt was said to have been lethargic but effective. He was certainly handicapped by the absence of Harry Hopkins, whose stomach cancer had confined him to bed during the entire conference.

  On Roosevelt’s return voyage, the battle cruiser USS Quincy anchored in the Suez Canal’s Great Bitter Lake, known biblically as Lake Marah. (Ironically, this was the spot where Moses, leading the Exodus of Jews out of Egypt, had stopped over on his way to the promised land.) It was here that the president met with Saudi Arabia’s king Ibn Saud over the fate of Jewish refugees from Europe.

  The king’s arrival on the U.S. destroyer Murphy was an astonishing spectacle to the president and his entourage. Abdulaziz Ibn Saud appeared, like Cleopatra on her barge, perched on a gilded throne atop a pile of Turkish rugs on the destroyer’s forward gun deck. The entire forecastle was bedecked by a ferocious-looking cadre of royal bodyguards, dark-skinned and barefoot, brandishing long-barreled rifles and unsheathed scimitars.

  Behind the fo’c’sle, an enormous canvas sleeping tent had been erected for the king and his forty-eight-man retinue—including the king’s personal food taster and an astrologer—all of whom slept on the rugs. On the stern of the destroyer was a flock of eighty sheep to provide the Arabs’ meals. According to presidential biographer Frank Freidel, the Murphy’s crew received “an unwanted thrill” when they discovered one of the king’s servants cooking lamb on an open fire at the entrance to the ship’s powder magazine. One American witness billed it as “a spectacle out of the past on the deck of a modern man-of-war.”5

  The sight became stranger still when the king, “a whale of a man” in abundant robes with gold bunting and a dagger at his waist, was hoisted in the Murphy’s bosun’s chair, transferred aerially across the waters of the Great Bitter Lake, and deposited on the Quincy’s deck. Here, he was introduced to Roosevelt, who was wearing his long blue navy cape and battered fedora. At the behest of the Navy, among others, the president made every effort to flatter the king, whose small country was sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves that were presently under exclusive contract to California’s Standard Oil Company.6

  More important at the moment was the terrible issue of some ten thousand desperate Jewish refugees who had been driven from their homelands by the Nazis. They now wished to immigrate to Palestine, a British mandate from the old League of Nations largely influenced by the Arab League, of which Saudi Arabia was a founding member. The Saudi king’s response to Roosevelt’s entreaty that these Jews be allowed to settle in the highly disputed Palestinian lands was so emphatic that the president could not bring himself even to paraphrase it for the press, let alone repeat it verbatim. All he told reporters was that “it was perfectly awful.”7

  Never one to give up on an important issue, Roosevelt brought up the subject of Jewish immigration several times again during the next four hours of conversation. But each time, the king’s response was more “emphatic” than the last. At length Roosevelt changed the subject to agriculture, an idea that ranged back to his flight over the Saudi desert en route to the Tehran Conference in 1943. The president raised the prospect of irrigating the desert by pumping a wealth of underground water that would make the arid land bloom with fruits and vegetables. The king replied that would be okay with him so long as such environmental prosperity “would not be inherited by the Jews.”8

  * * *

  ON MARCH 1, SEVERAL DAYS AFTER his return from Yalta, Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress. This time he did not have to endure the agony of standing through his talk but was rolled out in his chair to a desk cluttered with a dozen microphones. He told the congressmen that he had seen what the Germans did in the Crimea, and that “there was no place existing on earth for German militarism and Christian decency.”

  During the speech, Roosevelt looked physically in good shape; his voice was strong and steady and the bags under his eyes had receded. He told his audience: “I come from the Crimea conference in the firm belief that we have made a good start on the road to a world of peace…a permanent structure of peace upon which we can build.”

  It was an early spring in Washington, the spring of 1945. The cherry blossoms dripped from the trees along the Tidal Basin and covered the ground like fruits from exotic cornucopias. In the White House, there was always the bustle of official business and correspondence, meetings, decisions, speeches, and letters to be answered. Roosevelt slept late more often now. When Eleanor wasn’t around, Lucy Rutherfurd often came to dinners.

  Roosevelt protested in writing the fact that Stalin was now closing off Poland and other areas under Soviet occupation; the notion of holding free elections seemed to have evaporated. Stalin did hold one free election—in Hungary—but the Communists were defeated, so he nullified the results.

  “We can’t do business with Stalin,” Roosevelt declared privately. “He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” In trying to square this disillusionment with what he’d told Congress earlier that month, Roosevelt confided to the New York Times that “Stalin is either not a man of his word or not in control in the Kremlin.”

  By the first of April Roosevelt was so run-down that he needed to go to Warm Springs for its restorative atmosphere. He always felt good at Warm Springs; the mere idea of the place revived him. Once in Georgia, he got from his train into his special car with the hand controls and drove himself to the Little White House. The troubles of the world of course followed him there: a bitter Communist uprising in Yugoslavia and Russian intransigence at the fledgling United Nations, which was then being organized in San Francisco. He began to tire again and easily became lethargic, especially in the afternoons.

  But at night, Roosevelt became a different man. After a cocktail or two he perked up and was lively and smiling, the cares having vanished for that particular day. Accompanying him in Georgia were his two favorite cousins Polly Delano and Daisy Suckley. Lucy Rutherfurd was there as well, with her friend the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who was painting a watercolor portrait of the president for Lucy.9

  The morning of April 12 began on a high note. Roosevelt sat in his favorite leather chair at Mme. Shoumatoff’s request, wearing his big navy cape draped over his shoulders. He joked and told stories as he worked on his papers at a card table set by the fireplace. Shoumatoff was at her easel with her watercolor paints.

  At 1:15 p.m., right before lunch, Roosevelt suddenly put his hand up to his forehead. “I have a terrible headache,” he said. His hand dropped and he slumped sideways. Mme. Shoumatoff gasped and let out a small scream. It happened very suddenly. Then everyone was moving around, fetching the doctor, calling the Secret Service men—doing something. Arthur Prettyman, the president’s valet, rushed in. He and another man carried the unconscious Roosevelt to his bedroom, which was right off the living room, and laid him on the bed.10

  The president was in a coma, perspiring heavily, his breathing slow and shallow. The doctor, a young Navy commander, administered drugs meant to revive him but with no effect. A long wait began; CPR was started. The doctor spoke with McIntire in Washington and told him the situation was serious. Eleanor was notified. Shoumatoff gathered up Lucy and summoned their chauffeur. Within a few minutes the two women were off the property, headed for Lucy’s winter estate in Aiken, South Carolina.11

  At 3:35 p.m. Franklin D. Roosevelt died.

  * * *

  ELEANOR ARRIVED EARLY the next morning, dressed in black, having flown to Warm Springs with Dr. McIntire and Roosevelt’s press secretary Steve Early. She entered the Little White House cottage to find Roosevelt’s cousins Polly Delano and Daisy Suckley, valet Arthur Prettyman, an
d his secretary Grace Tully. Also present were two local morticians.

  Eleanor remarked to no one in particular that she was going in to see her husband. After about five minutes she returned, dry-eyed but slightly flustered. The morticians asked about caskets—mahogany, bronze? Eleanor wasn’t sure. McIntire said bronze.

  A funeral train was prepared by the Southern Railway Company, its engines and cars painted a gleaming forest green. Two thousand soldiers had been ordered up from nearby Fort Benning to line the road from the Little White House compound to the train station at Warm Springs; a military band was present with a drum corps to play the funeral dirge. Before the funeral party had departed, someone noticed there was no American flag draping the casket. One of the Army officers ordered that the one flying from the flagpole in the circle out front of the cottage be hauled down and used for the presidential shroud.

  The train left at 10:13 for the twenty-four-hour trip to Washington. All along the route people lined the tracks in respect. The president’s flag-draped casket could be seen through the big panoramic parlor windows in the last car. Men stood with their hats in hand, women and children looked on in awe. Some were daubing at their eyes with handkerchiefs or balled fists.

  In the capital the next morning, the casket was removed from the train and strapped on a black artillery caisson pulled by six white horses from the elite honor guard unit at Fort Myer, Virginia. The procession was augmented by various units from the Army, Navy, Marines, and the Brigade of Midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, as well as motorcycle police, bands, and guidon units with flags. Limousines bearing family and friends headed the procession, more than two miles long. An estimated 350,000 mourners lined Pennsylvania Avenue as the funeral cortege made its way to the White House.

  The Blue Room was filled with prominent guests, including President and Mrs. Harry S. Truman and their daughter, Roosevelt’s old opponent Thomas Dewey, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, all the cabinet members and Supreme Court justices, a great many ambassadors, and office staff. The family sat in front of the casket, which was surrounded by heaps of flowers. At exactly 4 p.m. the Right Reverend Angus Dun, Episcopal bishop of the Washington diocese, stepped in front of the casket and told the mourners to sing the naval hymn “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” one of Roosevelt’s favorites.

  Among those not present was Winston Churchill, who had intended to come all along and actually had his Skymaster warming up on the runway. But minutes before takeoff he got into a snit with his foreign minister, Anthony Eden, who also wanted to go. In a decision that the prime minister regretted to the end of his days he decided to remain.

  Churchill had, however, penned a note to Eleanor: “I feel so deeply for you all. As for me, I have lost a dear and cherished friendship which was forged in the fire of war. I trust you may find consolation in the glory of his name and the magnitude of his work.”12

  The Russians suspected Roosevelt had been poisoned, and Stalin himself recommended an autopsy. The Japanese, on the other hand, for reasons known only to themselves, sent planes out to the U.S. fleet fighting at Okinawa to drop leaflets expressing regret at Roosevelt’s passing.13

  Across America at that moment, most things came to a halt while a two-minute silence was observed for people to pause and meditate on the passing of their longtime leader. Radios went silent, as did Wall Street stock tickers. Hats were doffed; some people kneeled, some wept. The service was simple; more hymns were sung. It was over in twenty minutes.

  After Eleanor had arrived at the Little White House and had her time with the deceased Franklin, she sat with the women in the small living room and asked each what had happened. When she got to Polly Delano she was told that Mme. Shoumatoff was there painting her husband’s portrait for Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, who was also in attendance. Not only that, she explained that Mrs. Rutherfurd was frequently present at White House dinners when Eleanor was away, and that her own daughter, Anna, was the facilitator of these rendezvous. Eleanor apparently absorbed this information without comment. But the news would have obviously come as a blow, for she had not only just lost her husband but suddenly come to the understanding that he had carried on a twenty-eight-year-long affair with the woman he’d promised never to see again back in 1919.

  Following the funeral service in the White House, Eleanor had summoned Anna to her sitting room and confronted her furiously with Polly’s revelations. Anna is said to have admitted to sponsoring the Lucy Rutherfurd dinners but said she did so only to assuage her father’s “loneliness.”

  These scenes are recorded in detail in books by Jim Bishop and Joseph Persico. But only Bishop—whose book FDR’s Last Year is unsourced—says, in his introduction, that Anna Roosevelt spoke with him at length about the relationship between Lucy Rutherfurd and her parents. I can find no reason not to take him at his word. However she mourned or remembered her husband, Eleanor continued to make her own important contributions to world affairs. After Franklin’s death she would go on to serve as U.S. delegate to the United Nations.

  * * *

  LATE ON THE AFTERNOON of Roosevelt’s funeral, the train departed for Hyde Park where the bells in the small St. James Episcopal church were tolling for its most illustrious senior warden. Family, friends, and dignitaries crowded into the small hemlock-hedged rose garden, where Roosevelt’s parents were buried. A grave had been dug, surrounded by enormous sprays of flowers. A number of local residents had brought small handpicked bouquets that they laid beside the bier.

  Cannons began to boom out the final twenty-one-gun salute as the artillery caisson with the casket was hauled up the hill by the six white horses. A seventh horse, in the lead, was caparisoned in black with boots reversed in the stirrups. The West Point band played the funeral march, while a drum corps beat out the muffled cadence. When the mourners were situated by the grave, the entire six-hundred-man body of West Point cadets in their dress grays filed into the enclosure, two by two, and took their places at attention in the rear along the hemlock hedge.

  The rector of St. James, in full regalia, performed the brief burial service. At the end, a rifle salute was fired over the grave. Then, as the casket was lowered, the band played “Hail to the Chief” one final time.

  Franklin Roosevelt’s story thus was ended. Loved by many, hated by others, he had come into office as an optimist in the depths of the Great Depression. It took nearly a decade for the economy to rectify itself, and then only when the nation began gearing up for war. But Roosevelt’s sunny disposition in his speeches and fireside chats reassured people that their government had not forgotten them. Then, as war clouds darkened, he was quick to see the dangers, and smart enough to navigate past the entangling fingers of the isolationists to help a struggling Britain when she had no other friend in the world.

  After Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt became an ideal leader in the Allied arrangement. His judgments were cautious and well considered. Thankfully, he had listened to Winston Churchill’s warnings about trying to invade France too early, even when his military advisers thought otherwise. There were great and terrible decisions to be made, and Roosevelt never shied from making them. If he had a fault, it was in placing too much trust in Stalin’s Soviet Union. His role in the eradication of the evil Axis is undiminished. Roosevelt’s hand, from the United Nations to the World Bank, is seen everywhere in the brave new world that emerged from the ashes of World War II.

  * * *

  IN 1944, WITH THE GERMANS now driven back across their own borders, Joseph Stalin turned his attention to domestic issues. He had become concerned that nationalism in his various provinces—especially the Caucasus—was holding sway over communism, a development that needed eradication at any cost.

  Earlier on, the war had caused Stalin to relax some previous controls over nationalism on the theory that people would fight harder if they felt they were fighting for their national homeland. But now this must be reined in. He had already
banished numerous ethnic groups to Siberia or Far East Asia—but there were yet more whom he feared were clinging to their national or ethnic identities. Stalin’s version of communism had no use for “diversity” of any stripe; these people and all their instincts would have to be crushed. According to historian Edvard Radzinsky, “Terror had almost vanished from the land by 1944. But on the threshold of victory, Stalin began reviving it.”

  Lavrenty Beria, head of the secret police, was selected for the job. All through the spring and summer of 1944, NKVD agents uprooted hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Balkans, Ingushes, Kalmyks, Tatars, and other ethnic peoples and shipped them bag and baggage to the wilderness lands beyond the Ural Mountains, where many became indentured workers in the Soviet gulag system. Some of these ethnic groups had in fact defected or cozied up to the German occupiers—not because they were admirers of Nazism but because they abhorred Stalin’s version of communism. Or any version of it, for that matter.*1

  Russia’s Jews, whom Stalin referred to as “rootless cosmopolitans,” came in for a special malediction. They had made the mistake of asking Stalin to give them a national homeland in the Crimea, which had recently been (forcibly) vacated by the Tatars. Instead, the Jews were denounced for stealing Russian inventions and giving them to foreigners, an accusation that soon “degenerated into lunacy.” Public announcements were made that “the discoveries of Russian scientists had been pirated wholesale.” The steam engine, for example, had not been invented by Watt but by a Siberian worker named Polzunov; Edison had not invented the electric lightbulb, a Russian named Yablochkov had. Popov, not Marconi, had invented the wireless radio; Petrov discovered the electric arc; and a man named Mozhaisky, not the Wright brothers, had built and flown the first successful airplane—and so on. These absurd claims generated gales of horse laughter worldwide and were soon put under wraps—except within the Soviet school system, where they continued to be taught as true. The Jews would not get the Crimea as a homeland, but Stalin needed them “temporarily.” Later, their time would come.14