His excitement over these future travels notwithstanding, Roosevelt could not conceal the depth of his exhaustion. To recover and prepare his speech to inaugurate the United Nations, Roosevelt departed the White House at the end of March for a fortnight’s vacation in Warm Springs, hopeful that this place of almost preternatural rejuvenation for him would once more do its work. “It wasn’t just a matter of our hoping the trip would help the Boss,” Secret Service agent Mike Reilly said, “we just naturally assumed it would.” This assumption was shared by everyone. For more than a dozen years Franklin Roosevelt had been a national emblem of resilience, his confidence in recovery and victory infusing and infused by the people.
“The thought never occurred to me,” White House speechwriter Robert Sherwood later wrote, “that this time he might fail to rally as he always had.” On the morning of April 12, Roosevelt’s color seemed “exceptionally good” as he went through his mail and sat for a portrait. “He looked smiling and happy & ready for anything,” his cousin Margaret observed. Suddenly then, his head slumped forward and he collapsed from a cerebral hemorrhage, never to regain consciousness.
Franklin Roosevelt had died as Theodore Roosevelt had once yearned he might die himself, as a leader in harness in the midst of battle, his life dissolving into the task before him. At his death, he was endeavoring to gain victory in a war to save democracy and to lay the groundwork for global peace. That he was listed as a casualty of war is a simple statement of fact. It was not the grandeur of a knight-errant’s death, but his quiet heroism—the willingness to persevere as long as he was able—that was so telling.
Though he rarely spoke of his legacy, Roosevelt had “a keen sense of history and his own place therein.” An inveterate collector, he had directed his White House staff to save every document, every letter, every scrap of paper that came into his office. Six years before his death, he had bequeathed his papers to the government and pledged part of his Hyde Park estate for the building of a library and museum, a formal act that initiated the system of presidential libraries. A confident Roosevelt wanted to give historians full access to his personal and professional papers to make their own evaluations of his leadership.
In his own judgment, as Roosevelt made clear when he laid the cornerstone of his library, the key to that leadership could be found in the dependable, reciprocal relationship he had established with the people he served: “Of the papers which will come to rest here I personally attach less importance to the documents of those who have occupied high public or private office, than I do the spontaneous letters which have come to me and my family and my associates from men, from women, and from children in every part of the United States, telling me of their conditions and problems, and giving me their opinions.”
So unique was the tender intimacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership that in the days after his death, the New York Times reported, “in the streets of every American town, strangers stopped to commiserate with one another. Over and over again one heard the same lament: ‘We have lost our friend.’ ”
“The greatest human tribute,” one citizen from Trenton wrote, “is that because one man died 130 millions feel lonely.”
* * *
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln rose with great and unaccustomed cheer to greet the final day of his life.
The evening before, the city of Washington had been in dazzling holiday illumination. At long last, the punishing Civil War was coming to an end. The Republic had been saved. Candles glinted in the windows of every building, gorgeous lanterns swayed along the walls, and flags flew from the roofs of every housetop. The streets were filled with people “drunk with joy,” strolling arm in arm, talking, laughing, singing. Ten days earlier, the Confederate capital at Richmond had been evacuated. The following week, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his army to General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox. Each passing night, it seemed, brought new reasons to celebrate: a suspension of the draft had been announced by the War Department, purchases of military supplies had been halted, ports opened for trade, and Grant himself was coming to the White House.
Lincoln had breakfast that morning with his wife, Mary, and their oldest son, Robert, a captain in the army and a member of Grant’s staff, who had just returned from the front. Word came to the breakfast room that House Speaker Schuyler Colfax had arrived. Colfax was planning a cross-country trip to California and wanted to confirm that Lincoln had no plans to call an extra session of Congress. Lincoln assured him that he did not. “How I would rejoice to make that trip!” Lincoln told Colfax. “I can only envy you its pleasures.”
And then, rising from his chair, Lincoln outlined a message that he wanted Colfax to deliver to the gold and silver miners in the West. He had been thinking about the hundreds of thousands of returning veterans who would be looking for jobs. He believed that in the great western country, “from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific,” lay an “inexhaustible” supply of mineral wealth, the surface of which had hardly been scratched. In that vast mining region, there was “room enough for all”—for returning soldiers and new immigrants alike. Tell the miners that “I shall promote their interests to the utmost of my ability, because their prosperity is the prosperity of the nation, and we shall prove in a very few years that we are indeed the treasury of the world.”
At 11 a.m. Lincoln headed for his regularly scheduled Friday cabinet meeting. The forbidding war room of maps, battle planning, and military paraphernalia that had characterized cabinet meetings for longer than four years had on this day acquired a brighter mood and a serious new subject—how best to proceed with reconciliation and reconstruction. “This is the great question before us,” Lincoln announced, “and we must soon begin to act.”
From the outset, Lincoln wanted to establish the healing tone that must prevail in the months to come. “Enough lives have been sacrificed,” he said. “We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union.” Indeed, Lincoln considered it auspicious that Congress had adjourned on March 4, the day of the second inauguration, for there were men there “who, if their motives were good, were nevertheless impracticable, and possessed feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which he did not sympathize and would not participate.”
To the question of what to do with the rebel leaders, Lincoln made clear that “none need expect he would take any part in hanging or killing those men, even the worst of them.” He understood that their continued presence might hobble the process of healing, but he would prefer to simply “frighten them out of the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off,” emphasizing his intentions with a gesture of uplifted palms as if shooing sheep from the paddock. They should be informed, however, that while “no attempt will be made to hinder them” if they voluntarily chose to leave, “if they stay, they will be punished for their crimes.”
General Grant, having just returned from Appomattox, joined the cabinet meeting and related the story of General Lee’s surrender. “What terms did you make for the common soldiers?” Lincoln asked. “I told them to go back to their homes and their families,” Grant responded, “and they would not be molested, if they did nothing more.” As for the officers, they could keep their private horses and their sidearms; Grant believed it would be an unnecessary humiliation to call upon them to deliver up their personal property. Hearing this, the president’s “face glowed with approval.”
For three hours and more, the cabinet members hashed out problems of communication and commerce, reopening post offices and federal courts, reestablishing connections to allow for commercial and social intercourse—the nuts-and-bolts needed to suture relations with the defeated rebels and begin the re-creation of a unified country. Lincoln found any simple imposition of federal power upon the states abhorrent. “Let ’em up easy,” Lincoln repeated on several occasions, “let ’em up easy.” He felt strongly that it was not his executive prerogative to “undertake to run State governments in all these southern states. Their people
must do that—though I reckon at first some of them may do it badly.” The process of reconstruction must be built step by step and remain sensitive to unfolding events. Of utmost importance, the process must be flexible.
“Didn’t our Chief look grand today!” Secretary of War Edwin Stanton remarked to a colleague after the meeting drew to a close. “That’s the most satisfactory cabinet meeting I have attended in many a long day.” There was general agreement among the members of the cabinet that Lincoln had never seemed “more glad, more serene.” The “indescribable sadness, which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element of his very being,” one member observed, “had been suddenly changed to an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been achieved.”
At three o’clock that afternoon, Lincoln and Mary took a leisurely carriage drive. “You almost startle me by your great cheerfulness,” Mary told Lincoln. He replied, “and well I may feel so, Mary, I consider this day, the war has come to a close.” And then he added, “I have never felt better in my life.”
As the carriage rolled toward the Navy Yard, they spoke of their future together once his presidency was over. They were both relatively young. Lincoln was fifty-six, Mary forty-six. They hoped to travel with their sons—to journey through Europe, visit the Holy Land, cross the Rocky Mountains and see California and the West Coast for the first time. Finally they would come full circle to Illinois, where their marriage had begun.
The carriage returned to the White House just as a group of old friends, including Illinois governor Richard Oglesby, were taking their leave. “Come back, boys, come back,” Lincoln implored them. He had been through a long, starving time and badly wanted to relax, chat, perform, and especially read aloud from one of his humorous books. “They kept sending for him to come to dinner,” Oglesby recalled. “He promised each time to go, but would continue reading the book. Finally he got a peremptory order that he must come to dinner at once.”
An early dinner was required, for the Lincolns had evening plans to go to Ford’s Theatre to see a light comedy, Our American Cousin. After dinner, Lincoln entertained another small group of friends, including Massachusetts congressman George Ashmun. As the hour reached eight o’clock, Lincoln stood up: “I suppose it’s time to go, though I would rather stay,” he said, the note of reluctance clear. “It had been advertised that we will be there and I cannot disappoint the people.” His word was out; his promise must be kept.
Lincoln’s assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth, was a familiar figure in the theater world. Having learned by midday of the president’s plans, Booth had decided that this night would provide the optimal chance to kill the man he considered an “even greater tyrant” than Julius Caesar. He believed posterity would honor him for the deed, and he would thereby achieve immortality. Thus was set in motion the most iconic moment of tragic horror in the history of the American presidency.
Booth was already inside the theater when the Lincolns took their seats in the comfortable presidential box. At twelve minutes past ten, Booth’s calling card gained him access to the rear of the executive box. The president was leaning forward in his rocking chair, his right hand on his chin, his arm on the railing. Booth moved silently forward to within two feet of Lincoln. He raised his derringer, pointed it behind Lincoln’s left ear, and fired. In a white fog of smoke, Lincoln slumped forward. Leaping from the box to the stage, Booth caught the spur of his riding boot on a regimental flag decorating the box. His awkward fall broke his leg, but before hobbling off the stage and escaping into the alley, he raised his dagger and shouted the words “Sic semper tyrannis” (Thus always to tyrants).
There was a savage, terrible irony in these words. The dying president had warned long before that lawlessness, murder, and mob rule would create fertile ground for a Caesar or a Napoleon, men of towering egos who would seek distinction by “pulling down” rather than “building up.” The dying president, who had worked much of his life to counter extremism, hate, and vindictiveness—who, that very afternoon, had counseled his colleagues against exercising arbitrary power over the vanquished southern states—was himself the victim of a racist extremist who would be remembered in infamy only for the man he killed.
“Mr. Lincoln had so much vitality,” doctors reported, that for nine hours after sustaining the wound that “would have killed most men instantly,” he continued to struggle. At 7:22 the following morning, that struggle came to an end. Abraham Lincoln was pronounced dead. “Now,” Stanton said, “he belongs to the ages.” Stanton’s tribute proved not merely poetic but an accurate description of the fame and influence that connects the moment of Lincoln’s death to the living values he passed on to us and to all succeeding generations.
What are the components of this legacy of living values—and how do they get passed on over time?
From the very moment he first appeared before the people as a twenty-three-year-old in Sangamon County, Lincoln connected education and history, remembrance of the past and freedom. He singled out education “as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in,” so that every man could “thereby be enabled to read the histories of his own and other countries to appreciate the value of our free institutions.”
As a twenty-nine-year-old, Lincoln worried that memories of the Revolution and the ideals for which it stood were growing “more and more dim by the lapse of time.” Through history, he had hoped that the story of our country’s founding would be “read of, and recounted, so long as the bible shall be read.” He considered history, an understanding of how we came to be, the best vehicle for understanding who we are and where we are going.
The master story Lincoln told grew deeper and simpler throughout his life. It was the narrative of our country, the birth of our democracy, and the development of freedom within our Union. At the time of his great debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln invited his audiences on a communal storytelling journey so they might collectively understand the dilemma of slavery in a free country and, together, fashion a solution. At Gettysburg, he challenged the living to finish “the unfinished work” for which so many soldiers had given their lives—that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” At the Second Inaugural, Lincoln asked his countrymen “to strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” These same words nourished Franklin Roosevelt. He drew upon them, he said, because Abraham Lincoln had set goals for the future “in terms of which the human mind cannot improve.”
Lincoln never forgot that in a democracy the leader’s strength ultimately depends on the strength of his bond with the people. In the mornings he set aside several hours to hear the needs of the ordinary people lined up outside his office, his time of “public opinion baths.” Kindness, empathy, humor, humility, passion, and ambition all marked him from the start. But he grew, and continued to grow, into a leader who became so powerfully fused with the problems tearing his country apart that his desire to lead and his need to serve coalesced into a single indomitable force. That force has not only enriched subsequent leaders but has provided our people with a moral compass to guide us. Such leadership offers us humanity, purpose, and wisdom, not in turbulent times alone, but also in our everyday lives.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Simon & Schuster has been my publishing home for nearly four decades. I cannot imagine publishing a book without the team of Carolyn Reidy, Jonathan Karp, Alice Mayhew, Richard Rhorer, Jackie Seow, Stephen Bedford, Stuart Roberts, Julia Prosser, Lisa Healy, Kristen Lemire, Lisa Erwin, and Lewelin Polanco.
I am thankful once again to Jackie Seow, who patiently worked through countless jacket designs to create this final one; and to Julia Prosser and Stephen Bedford, whose expertise, keen insights, and tenacity have helped connect my books to my readers. To Stuart Roberts, who with such care shepherded the manuscript through every stage; and to my copy editor, Fred Chase, who was with me at my
Concord home during a difficult time and with warmth and patience completed the project.
I am especially grateful to Jonathan Karp whose creative vision helped me think about the structure of this book in a different way, including the use of case studies of the four leaders at pivotal moments.
On this book, as on so many others, Alice Mayhew provided masterly judgment, peerless editorial skills and steadfast support. For better than twenty years, I’ve been fortunate to have the unrivaled strength of Binky Urban as my literary agent.
And for almost forty years Linda Vandegrift has been my gifted research assistant. All my books have been informed by her extraordinary talent and incomparable investigative skills. Together, we have grown as storytellers.
For help with finding the daguerreotypes and photographs I thank my friend Michelle Krowl, as well as the talents of Bryan Eaton, Jay Godwin, and Matthew Hanson.
For critical artistic input on the book’s jacket, I thank Juliana Rothschild; and for providing perceptive structural judgment and precision of language on every chapter, I am indebted to Ida Rothschild.
It is hard to describe the role my manager and cherished friend Beth Laski played in this book or indeed plays in my life. For me she is absolutely indispensable. For two decades her stunning talents, ingenuity, and imagination, loyalty, and her passion have sustained me and given me balance. As she knows, she is my “Harry.”
And first and last, my late husband, Richard Goodwin, and Michael Rothschild.
Our three lives and our families have been intertwined for more than forty years. Michael is a brilliant writer, sculptor, apple orchardist, and farmer—the closest to Thomas Jefferson, Dick once told me, whom he had ever met. Year after year, the three of us worked together on writing projects. We read the same books, debated ideas, and fought over language. In Dick’s memory and to Michael’s presence, this book is dedicated.
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