The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Everyone was sworn to the strictest secrecy.

  Admiral McIntire assured the press that FDR just had a touch of persistent bronchitis; “for a man of 62-plus,” he said, he was doing fine.

  “I am more worried than I let anyone know,” Daisy Suckley confided to her diary. “There must be something definitely wrong or they wouldn’t have these consultations.”

  Nineteen forty-four was another presidential election year. The cross-Channel invasion of Europe was still weeks away. American forces had only just begun to fight their way island by island across the Pacific toward Japan. And, although just a handful of people knew it, the commander in chief—the most powerful man on earth—was seriously, perhaps fatally, ill.

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Dr. Howard Bruenn’s notes of his first meeting with FDR, during which he diagnosed congestive heart failure, March 27, 1944, and the determinedly optimistic White House statement on the president’s health as it appeared in the New York Times three days later

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  Bundled against the cold, the president and Mrs. Roosevelt lay a wreath at the Lincoln Memorial on Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, 1944. Daisy Suckley feared that his drive in an open car on a wintry day would be bad for FDR. He had a constant headache, she wrote. “I feel it must come from being constantly tired—never getting really rested, specially since having the flu.”

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  CHAPTER 7

  A Strong and Active Faith

  1944–1962

  Eleanor Roosevelt on the move: carrying her own bag to save time at the age of seventy-six, she crosses the tarmac at New York’s La Guardia Airport, 1960.

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  A Very Quiet Time

  In April of 1944, in the midst of the Second World War, the president of the United States seemed to have vanished. Wartime security had obscured Franklin Roosevelt’s movements ever since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but this was different. He was said to be vacationing “somewhere in the South,” getting over a bout of bronchitis.

  Actually, he was resting on the sprawling South Carolina estate of the financier Bernard M. Baruch. Coast Guard men and Marines guarded the perimeter. He had been secretly diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and his doctors feared for his life.

  Reporters from the three wire services, housed eight miles away, were told nothing about the president’s actual condition, and were rarely able even to lay eyes on him. They were told to “stay out of the old man’s way,” Merriman Smith of the United Press recalled. “He wanted seclusion and lots of it.”

  FDR’s uncharacteristic silence was interrupted by embarrassing headlines about him and his family.

  Elliott’s second wife won a divorce on the grounds of “unkind, harsh and tyrannical” treatment. When his sons Marine Lieutenant Colonel James Roosevelt and Navy Lieutenant Commander Franklin Roosevelt Jr. both received promotions, Republican newspapers charged favoritism. Despite the courage all of the Roosevelt boys had shown in combat, GOP congressmen routinely attacked their war records, claiming that they were somehow being protected against harm. Elliott Roosevelt, who won the Distinguished Flying Cross, had written to his father that “I sometimes really hope that one of us gets killed so that … they’ll stop picking on the rest of the family.”

  Democratic Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri insisted that the White House respond formally to a letter from a constituent claiming that Mrs. Roosevelt was using four cars and burning up two thousand gallons of precious rationed gasoline a month, gallivanting around the country. Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, an isolationist Democrat who had long since broken with the president, predicted that FDR’s health would prevent him from running again, adding, “I wouldn’t vote for my own brother for a fourth term.”

  Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had already occupied the White House for more than eleven years. Millions of Americans could remember no other first family, and had a hard time imagining another, especially so long as the country—and the world—were still at war.

  FDR wanted to see the struggle through to victory—and then to do what Woodrow Wilson had been unable to do after the First World War: bring the United States into a new international organization strong enough to ensure that the world would not go to war again. Then, he told his devoted cousin Daisy Suckley, he thought he might break yet another presidential precedent and retire from office before his fourth term ended.

  Meanwhile, he would maintain the strictest secrecy about his own condition—even from his wife. “I wouldn’t discuss [the President’s health] with him,” she recalled, “because I hated the idea and he knew I hated it. Either he felt he ought to serve a fourth term and wanted it or he didn’t. That was up to the man himself to decide and no one else.”

  When FDR finally returned to the White House, Daisy Suckley and Anna were relieved to see that a month in South Carolina had cleared up the president’s supposed “bronchitis.”

  “Everyone wanted to greet the President and see how he looked and felt,” Daisy wrote on May 10. “Anna and I held long talks about his ‘routine,’ and how difficult it is going to be to keep him to it. Anna … had the brilliant thought of suggesting a nice cool lunch on the porch.… The lawn looking ‘green as green.’ The President looked across at the Jefferson Memorial and decided to give instructions for trimming the trees back, [for the] vista.”

  FDR did his best to follow his doctor’s regimen and was pleased to be losing weight because it would allow him more easily to stand in his braces. But he remained listless and easily tired.

  Despite his frailty and the relentless demands of the continuing struggle overseas, Roosevelt had ambitious postwar plans for his country. In his latest State of the Union message, he had called for a new “Economic Bill of Rights” that would guarantee to every American a living wage, a decent home, a good education, and adequate medical care. “Unless there is security here at home,” he said, “there cannot be a lasting peace in the world.”

  The GI Bill of Rights—signed by the president after it was passed by Congress without a single dissenting vote—would provide almost eight million returning veterans with vocational or college educations, help more than two million more to buy new homes, and offer other kinds of loans to launch hundreds of thousands of new businesses. No other single piece of legislation would do more to expand the American middle class.

  Eleanor applauded her husband’s renewed call for reform and was determined to make sure he did not abandon it. But she thought he was exaggerating his medical condition for attention and complained that by dining alone with Anna and Daisy he was cut off from the dissenters she had always invited to speak their minds to him over the dinner table.

  FDR craved company—but not that kind. He asked Anna if she would quietly arrange to have Lucy Rutherfurd come to dinner again. One evening, Franklin Jr., home on leave, returned to the White House unannounced and was startled to find his father in the Oval Study, a strange woman massaging his legs. He had no idea who she was. His father simply said, “This is an old friend.” They shook hands, and the younger Roosevelt went on his way. Years later, he realized it had been Mrs. Rutherfurd.

  Hobcaw, Bernard Baruch’s South Carolina home, where FDR sought to regain his health in the spring of 1944. “I had really a grand time down at Bernie’s,” he told Harry Hopkins after he got back to Washington, “slept twelve hours out of the twenty-four, sat in the sun, never lost my temper, and decided to let the world go hang. The interesting thing is the world didn’t go hang.”

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  In a frame from a home movie made by one of the president’s guards, two aides lean over FDR, who has been carried out to the beach for a little time in the sun.

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  Portraits of the president’s sons in uniform that Roosevelt kept on his White House desk throughout the war: (left to right, top to bottom) Elliott, James, Franklin Jr., and John

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br />   The Roosevelts in 1944. There were times, their daughter, Anna, remembered, when it was clear that FDR’s blood was not pumping the way it should. “I saw this with my own eyes, but I don’t think Mother saw it.… [She wasn’t] interested in physiology.”

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  FDR on his return from Hobcaw, May 7, 1944. “Brown as a berry, radiant and happy,” William Hassett noted in his diary. “But he is thin and although his color is good I fear that he has not entirely shaken the effects of the flu, followed by bronchitis, which have bedeviled him for many weeks now.”

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  Roosevelt signs the GI Bill of Rights, June 22, 1944. “Lack of money,” he said, “should not prevent any veteran of this war from equipping himself for the most useful employment for which his aptitude and willingness qualify him.” Among the legislators crowded into the Oval Office for the ceremony is Republican Congresswoman Edith N. Rogers of Massachusetts, who helped draft and then cosponsored the bill.

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  Pride of Our Nation

  On the morning of May 19, 1944, the president and Daisy Suckley drove up to Top Cottage to see the dogwood in bloom. By then, the world had been waiting nearly thirty months for the Allies to launch their invasion of Nazi-occupied western Europe. “We put a couple of chairs in the sun, north of the porch,” she wrote, “and just talked quietly about the view, the dogwood, a little about the coming invasion of Europe. Next week is the time, the exact date depending on wind and weather and tide.… How that event hangs over us—has been hanging over us for months—and here it is, almost at hand.”

  In the end, the invasion began with five coordinated landings along the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944—D-Day. As the attacks started, FDR broadcast a prayer he’d written with help from Anna and her husband, John Boettiger.

  Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard for the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

  The American commander who had been assigned to take Utah Beach on D-Day was the oldest man in the invasion force: fifty-seven-year-old Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the oldest son of the twenty-sixth president of the United States and the fifth cousin of the thirty-second. Drifting smoke that had obscured the target and strong currents that drove their landing craft off course had brought his men onto Utah Beach more than two thousand yards from the spot chosen by the D-Day planners. Roosevelt limped badly from arthritis and his World War I wounds, but he refused to seek cover. He had explained to his wife, “It steadies the young men to know that I am with them, plodding along with my cane.” He rallied his men who took the beachhead in less than an hour, then accompanied them as they fought their way inland, despite sporadic chest pains that he kept to himself. A little over a month later, he died of a massive heart attack.

  “Ted’s death did something to me from which I shall not recover,” Edith Roosevelt told her daughter Ethel. She had now outlived her husband and three out of four of her boys.

  Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for gallantry and courage at Utah Beach, the same medal his father had once sought for himself after the battle of San Juan Hill.

  FDR and Fala, photographed by Daisy Suckley at Top Cottage, where he alerted her to the imminent cross-Channel invasion

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  Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and his battered jeep, “Rough Rider,” photographed in Sicily, where he fought before taking part in the D-Day landings. “We’ve had a grand life,” he wrote to his wife on the eve of the invasion, “and I hope there’ll be more. Should it chance that there’s not, at least we can say that in our lives together we’ve packed enough for ten ordinary lives.”

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  D-Day, June 6, 1944, the ramp falls and a rifle company of the 18th Infantry Division steps off into the surf at Omaha Beach in the face of deadly fire from the cliffs above.

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  A stunned GI shivers on the shale after making it to cover.

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  The Contrariest Goddamn Mule

  Two days after D-Day, Admiral McIntire, the president’s official physician, issued one of his cheery periodic bulletins: the president’s health, he assured the press, was “excellent in all respects.”

  As the Democratic convention approached, fewer and fewer Democratic insiders believed him. But the Allies had not yet begun to fight their way through the hedgerows that boxed them in behind the Normandy beaches, and in the Pacific, American forces were still months away from beginning the campaign to retake the Philippines.

  No one was willing publicly to admit that Roosevelt was too ill to survive a fourth term. But now the choice of a vice presidential candidate assumed an importance it had never had before.

  Conservatives insisted on replacing the liberal Henry Wallace. Even some of Wallace’s supporters found him dreamy, impractical, aloof.

  Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a column praising him. The president told her not to publish it until the convention was over.

  He took no public position on who should be his running mate, but this time made no objection to the choice of the party’s more moderate leaders: Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman, who initially said he had no interest in the job.

  On July 20, the day the delegates were to nominate their vice presidential candidate in Chicago, the president was in San Diego, on his way to Hawaii for a conference about strategy in the Pacific.

  He telephoned Robert Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “Have you got that guy lined up yet on that Vice President?” he asked.

  “No,” Hannegan answered. “He’s the contrariest goddam mule from Missouri I ever saw.”

  “Well,” FDR said, “you tell him if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war and maybe lose that war, it’s up to him.”

  Truman gave in.

  Roosevelt accepted his party’s nomination from his railroad car on a siding in San Diego. An Associated Press photographer caught him looking especially gaunt and slack-jawed. The picture startled newspaper readers across the country, and the president’s press secretary kicked the photographer off the train. But Walter Trohan, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, noticed something else in the uncropped picture: a uniformed stranger who turned out to be FDR’s cardiologist, Lieutenant Commander Howard Bruenn, assigned to be at the president’s side wherever he went. Rumors that Roosevelt was even sicker than he looked began to spread.

  On Sunday evening, July 30, 1944, in Somerville, Massachusetts, Missy LeHand was taken to the movies. She had suffered two serious strokes three years earlier, but seemed to be improving. Then she saw the newsreel of FDR accepting his party’s nomination aboard his railroad car in San Diego. She hadn’t seen him for nearly a year. He looked like a different man—haggard and ill.

  Back home from the theater, Missy leafed through pictures of them both when they were young. That night, she suffered a third stroke. She died the following day.

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES The cropped photograph of a frail-looking president accepting his party’s nomination from San Diego, as it appeared in most newspapers, and the uncropped original that revealed to one sharp-eyed reporter that a navy cardiologist, Dr. Howard Bruenn (lower left), was in attendance.

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  Democratic convention delegates cheer their presidential candidate for the fourth time. FDR himself was less enthusiastic. “His mind was on the war,” James remembered. “His attitude toward the coming political campaign was one of
, ‘let’s get on with it.’ ”

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  Roosevelt and Truman lunch on the South Lawn of the White House, August 18, 1944, so that photographers can take pictures of them together. Truman noticed that the president’s hand trembled so badly he poured more cream into his saucer than into his tea.

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  It Scared the Hell out of Us

  On August 12, 1944, FDR returned from his voyage to Hawaii and Alaska and broadcast from the deck of the destroyer USS Cummings, moored at the Puget Sound Navy Yards at Bremerton, Washington. The words he spoke were characteristically confident: “The war [in the Pacific] is well in hand,” he said, though “I cannot tell you, if I knew, when the war will be over, either in Europe or in the Far East.” But that victory was sure to come faster, he told the shipyard workers assembled to hear him and their counterparts all across the country, if they maintained their pace at turning out the weapons and materiel needed to defeat the enemy and bring about “what we all want, the foundation of a lasting peace.”

  But, listening at home in Rhinebeck, Daisy Suckley noticed something else: “His voice sounded strong but, being on the lookout for anything ‘wrong,’ it seemed to me as though he was tired and that he once or twice got mixed up on his words—this would mean nothing with anyone else, but we expect perfection from the President and any tiny slip of any kind always worries me.”

  It worried others, too. Roosevelt had not stood to speak since losing so much weight; his braces no longer fit. The wind ruffled his speech. The deck heaved. He lost his place several times. And for nearly half of the thirty-five minutes he stood and spoke, he was also enduring intense pain across his chest and shoulders—a severe attack of angina. “It scared the hell out of us,” Dr. Bruenn remembered. But no one else was told, and Roosevelt soldiered on.