So Roosevelt bided his time, feeling superfluous, frustrated, and depressed until a chance for vigorous action arrived in April 1917 with America’s entry into the First World War. Roosevelt immediately sought permission to raise and command a division of volunteers. Long before, as a young man in the Badlands when border tensions with Mexico had begun to boil over, he had offered to raise a company of horse riflemen. He told his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, “There is some good fighting stuff among these harum-scarum rough riders out here.” Later, he had famously succeeded in mobilizing the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. So now, he beseeched President Woodrow Wilson to allow him to raise a volunteer division. Applications for his division poured in by the thousands, but Wilson denied his request.
All his life, Roosevelt had displayed a disturbing, romantic grandiosity about combat. “The great prize of death in battle” was a reward he “ranked above all others.” Once before he had even threatened to abandon his wife Edith’s bedside when she was seriously ill, if given the opportunity to engage in battle. He claimed at one point that “all who feel any joy in battle know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart”; in another instance he argued that the victories of war were greater than the victories of peace. His disappointment over Wilson’s refusal developed into a serious depression when his four sons were deployed overseas while he remained in “do-nothing ease and safety” at home. When his youngest son, Quentin, was killed in battle, his grief was so deep that he felt the world had “shut down” upon him, finally acknowledging “a sickening feeling” that he had inspired his boys to take undue risks.
His fiery will rekindled more quickly than his body recovered. In speeches and articles, he challenged his countrymen to honor those who had died by working together to make the country a fairer and more equitable place, by setting in motion sweeping reforms “to bring justice under new conditions in a new world.” Once again, his knight-errant style of leadership found a response, and before long Roosevelt was again the most popular man in the country.
Though he was urged to run for governor in 1918, he declined. “I have only one fight left in me,” he told his sister Corinne, “and I think I should reserve my strength in case I am needed in 1920.” The malaria he had contracted in Brazil had left him prone to fever, infection, and sporadic invalidism. A severe attack of rheumatoid arthritis sent him to the hospital for six weeks at the end of 1918. Cautioned that he might be required to use a wheelchair for the remainder of his days, he said, “All right! I can work that way, too.” There were too many things he wanted to accomplish before he died. Still in considerable pain when he returned home on Christmas Day, he acknowledged that he would be unable to get out much for a couple of months, but he set to work drafting articles and editorials, talking with party officials, and, most importantly, making plans for the next presidential election.
He spent Sunday, January 5, 1919, dictating letters and proofreading a piece for Metropolitan Magazine that outlined a full-scale domestic agenda that foreshadowed elements of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. He called for old age pensions, unemployment insurance, an eight-hour workday, and collective bargaining. He insisted that it was “an absurdity longer to higgle” over the women’s vote. He argued that government had a responsibility to ensure returning soldiers access to land and jobs. He proposed a universal national service program to mobilize young men and women from different backgrounds “to work in a spirit of brotherhood for the common good.” Long before, he had predicted that the “rock of class hatred” was “the greatest and most dangerous rock in the course of any republic,” that disaster would follow when “two sections, or two classes are so cut off from each other that neither appreciates the other’s passions, prejudices, and, indeed, point of view.”
At ten o’clock that night, after a packed day of brooding over plans for social and industrial reforms, he told Edith that he felt a curious “sensation of depression about the chest,” as if his heart was about to stop. “I know it is not going to happen,” he assured her, “but it is such a strange feeling.” The family physician was called but found nothing indicative of heart trouble, so Roosevelt settled into bed. He never woke up. He was sixty years old. A blood clot had reached his lungs and stopped his heart.
A note was found beside the bed to remind himself to get together with Republican Party chair Will Hays. At Roosevelt’s direction, Hays was planning a ten-day trip to Washington to bring Republican conservatives and progressives together around domestic issues. The split of 1912 had caused lingering distrust and antipathy on both sides. If Roosevelt were given another chance to lead the country, he intended to make the Republican Party once more the progressive party of Abraham Lincoln, to restore “the fellow feeling, mutual respect, the sense of common duties and common interests which arise when men take the trouble to understand one another, and to associate for a common object.”
His last waking dream, the expression of his powerful will, had looked forward to 1920, when the kaleidoscope might turn and things align, enabling him once more to grasp the reins of the leadership that he so loved.
* * *
That death stalked Franklin Roosevelt in the last year of his life is clear, but only in retrospect. Certainly, by 1944, Roosevelt appeared far older than his sixty-two years. Many noted his gray pallor, the darkened hollows beneath his eyes, how his hand shook as he attempted to light a cigarette. While he attributed this condition and his nagging cough to the combination of influenza and bronchitis he had contracted that winter, his daughter, Anna, was deeply worried. She had grown accustomed to his amazing physical resilience, but when spring arrived, fatigue continued to dog him and his strength seemed to be failing. She asked her father’s personal physician, Admiral Ross McIntire, to arrange a thorough checkup at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
“I suspected something was terribly wrong as soon as I looked at him,” recalled the young cardiologist Howard Bruenn. “His face was pallid and there was a bluish discoloration of his skin, lips and nail beds.” The simple act of moving from one side of the table to the other caused significant breathlessness. His heart was enlarged, there was fluid in his lungs, and his blood pressure was dangerously high. Bruenn’s diagnosis revealed that the president was suffering from acute congestive heart failure. Throughout the exam, Roosevelt chatted amiably about a wide range of topics, repelling any serious inquiry with a shield of talk. Not once did he question the doctor. Nor did Bruenn feel at liberty to impose his findings upon the patient; he had been forewarned by McIntire not to volunteer information. When the examination was completed, Roosevelt flashed his celebrated smile, thanked the doctor, and left, cheerfully greeting patients and members of the staff as he made his way to the car.
Later that same afternoon, Roosevelt conducted his 945th press conference. Asked how he felt, he coughed and admitted he had bronchitis and had gone to the hospital earlier to have X-rays taken. Was he alarmed? Not at all, he retorted. He had heard that bronchitis developed into pneumonia in one case out of 48,500 so he figured his prognosis was good! Laughter filled the room and the reporters went on to their regular sequence of policy questions. “Not only were the President’s color and voice better,” the New York Times noted, “but his spirits were good, too.” A week later, Dr. McIntire casually assured the press that the president simply suffered a lingering case of bronchitis. All he required was “some sunshine and exercise.”
Concealment of personal matters had been a major motif throughout Roosevelt’s life. He had been trained from boyhood to present a consistently confident and encouraging demeanor before his invalid father. During the six agonizing weeks he spent in the hospital after contracting polio, he had projected a uniformly optimistic image. By buoying up others, he had learned to uplift himself. In his mother’s family, Franklin’s cousin Laura Delano recalled, “You just never said you were sick.” Similarly, in the weeks and months that followed during the spring of 1944, Roosevelt chose to ignore his illness, always
keeping the potential gravity of his condition at arm’s length. He simply did what Dr. Bruenn’s new regimen required without asking questions. He took digitalis every day and displayed no interest in his blood pressure readings. Religiously, he followed the prescribed low-salt/low-fat diet and shed so much weight that he quipped proudly, “I’m a young man again. Look how flat my stomach is,” at which point “he slapped himself with a sense of glee.”
Roosevelt’s steadfast heartiness proved infectious. Innumerable accounts from his closest colleagues reveal that he was invariably able to rouse himself and focus on the task at hand. Even on days when he admittedly felt “like hell,” he remained, according to one aide, so “cheerful in spirit” and “good natured” that he did not seem seriously ill. While Frances Perkins had been initially appalled by his appearance early that spring, she was so relieved at the vitality he exhibited when he returned at the end of April from a two-week rest at financier Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina plantation that she “did not have another moment’s concern about him until very near the end.”
Yet no matter how much he tried to ignore the state of his health, no matter how brightly he burnished his image, Roosevelt knew that on bad days willpower alone kept him going. Why, then, did he decide to run for a fourth term in 1944? Four years earlier, in the spring of 1940, Hitler’s invasion of Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France had created a crisis for Western civilization that warranted breaking the cherished two-term tradition—in Roosevelt’s mind and in public opinion. By the spring of 1944, he had already been in office for twelve years, the longest presidential service in American history. Should he attempt, he asked friends, to extend the shattered precedent once more and run for a fourth term?
In late May 1944, seven weeks before the Democratic convention, Roosevelt’s indecision continued. The gargantuan jobs of ending the war and envisioning the peace to follow were far from a fait accompli. Hanging in the balance was nothing less than the survival of our nation and of democracy itself. A million men and supplies had been transported to embarkation posts in southern England, awaiting the signal to begin the invasion of Normandy. All the major European capitals remained in German hands, including Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Athens. Japan controlled the Philippines. “Terrible decisions to have to make,” Roosevelt’s cousin Margaret Suckley recorded in her diary. In private conversations with Suckley, Roosevelt disclosed his dilemma. On the one hand, the future being so challenging, he felt a profound sense of “duty to carry on, as long as he was able.” On the other hand, if he knew that he was “not going to be able to carry on for another four years, it wouldn’t be fair to the American people to run for another term.” The conclusive factor would be the condition of his health in the weeks ahead.
So immersed was he in the tasks at hand that events seemed to determine the state of his health and the level of the energy he had so carefully husbanded. His spirits rose with the news on D-Day, June 6, 1944, that the beach landings had been successful and that the troops, taking fewer casualties than expected, were advancing up the hills. In the late afternoon, Roosevelt held a press conference. “A great moment in history,” one reporter observed. “The President sat back in his great green chair calm and smiling.” His cigarette “was cocked at the angle they say he always has it when he is pleased with the world.” Throughout the proceedings, another reporter noted, “he seemed happy and confident,” though he warned against overconfidence. “You just don’t land on a beach and walk through—if you land successfully without breaking your leg—walk through to Berlin. And the quicker this country understands it the better.” That evening, Eleanor observed, her husband “looked very well and seemed himself again, full of plans for the future.”
Two weeks later, circumstances once more provided a tonic. Roosevelt looked “in the pink of condition” when he signed the G.I. Bill of Rights, the massive program of education and training for returning soldiers that would broaden the educational horizons of an entire generation. That Roosevelt had conceived the program eighteen months earlier, that he had begun postwar planning so long before the cross-channel invasion, was deemed, in speechwriter Sam Rosenman’s judgment, “one of the greatest examples of statesmanlike vision.” It was that vision, Perkins concluded, Roosevelt’s uncanny ability “to keep his head above the welter of administrative problems,” to see “the whole picture” and “keep his eye on the objectives of highest importance,” that persuaded all the key members of the cabinet and White House staff that the president, regardless of diminished energy and health, was the superior man to lead.
Five days before the Democratic convention was set to open, Roosevelt finally offered himself for a fourth term. His decision was driven primarily by his considered belief—given his long experience and wide-ranging knowledge of the central players and the stakes involved—that he was the best man to carry the war to its conclusion and lay the foundation for peace. He announced he would accept his party’s nomination a fourth time and serve as president if “so ordered by the Commander in Chief of us all—the sovereign people of the United States.” A week later, the delegates to the Democratic National Convention nominated Franklin Roosevelt by acclamation as their candidate, a fourth time, for president of the United States.
In the fall, Roosevelt had to demonstrate that he had the stamina to compete with his young Republican challenger, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. Roosevelt knew that his opponents were circulating a whispering campaign that he was no longer physically or mentally competent. “People have been asked to believe that I am all worn out and sick,” he said. There was but one sure method to disprove such gossip. He had to put himself before the people and let them make up their own minds about his capacities. He had to conduct “an old-fashioned, rough-and-tumble campaign.”
On a single day in New York City, three million people lined the streets as the president was driven fifty miles in an open car through Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, across Harlem, down Broadway, and into the Garment District. The tail of a hurricane had produced bone-chilling rains that pelted down upon the multitudes. Rain soaked the president’s suit, beaded his glasses, and trickled down his cheeks. The miserable weather neither quenched his smile nor stopped his progress, and the crowds loved him for it. The energy of the crowd gave him “a sense of belonging, gave him happiness.” They kept him so “warm,” he afterward told Perkins, that he didn’t realize he was “wet through.” Throughout the rest of the campaign, he was “full of fight,” and at the end he looked healthier than when he began. He had gained twelve pounds as well as gained election to a fourth consecutive term.
When Roosevelt was inaugurated on January 20, 1945, he had eighty-two days to live. From hindsight, critics would debate whether he was too debilitated to function effectively in his final months—whether, during the grueling marathon of diplomacy with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at Yalta, he had given too much for too little. At Yalta, his strength was manifestly waning; his physical condition was deteriorating. Yet, in the end, Roosevelt achieved his two foremost objectives. He secured Russia’s commitment to join the invasion of Japan, a struggle that was expected to cost a million American casualties. And he also secured Russia’s support for the creation of a new world organization for peace that would arise from the wreckage of the most destructive war in history.
Finishing the war and preparing for peace were the twin goals that propelled Roosevelt through his final days. Everything else was put on the back burner. Never did he take the time to share confidential briefings about the war with his vice president, Harry Truman. Nor—an appalling lapse—did he brief his successor on the existence of the atomic bomb. When asked later if he “might have been better prepared for the presidency,” Truman generously replied, Roosevelt “did all he could.”
Roosevelt reserved what strength remained for the “great unfinished business” of his administration: He was planning to go to San Francisco in late April, where representatives from fifty Allied
nations were to convene in order to establish the framework for the United Nations. After San Francisco, Roosevelt planned to go to England for a state visit. So excited was he at the prospect that he was unable to keep it a secret. He brought it up in conversation with Canada’s prime minister, Mackenzie King, and again with Perkins. His eyes sparkled with anticipation when he told Perkins that Eleanor would accompany him to England and that he had urged her to order some fine clothes so she would “make a really handsome appearance.”
The future promised to hold a crowded and jubilant itinerary. They would journey by ship to Southampton and then by rail to London, where they would stay at Buckingham Palace with the king and queen. He would drive with the king through the streets of London, address Parliament, and then spend several days with Churchill at his estate, Chequers. Churchill predicted that the “genuine and spontaneous” reception the president would receive from the British people would be “the greatest reception ever accorded to any human being since Lord Nelson made his triumphant return to London.”
“But the war!” Perkins protested. “I don’t think you ought to go. It is dangerous.” Roosevelt cupped his hand over his mouth and whispered in her ear, “The war in Europe will be over by the end of May.” It greatly comforted Perkins, she later said, “that he was so sure, two weeks before his death, that the end of the war was at hand.”
Leadership Page 47
