The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  The president still had big plans. He told Eleanor he wanted her to accompany him to the opening session of the United Nations in San Francisco, just a few weeks away. The war in Europe would be over by the end of May, he said, and they would then travel to Britain together, pay a return visit to the royal family, then move on to Holland and France and the front personally to thank the men who had helped defeat the Nazis. And he hoped someday, after he left the White House, to travel to the Middle East and show the people there how to make their desert bloom. But first, he told Daisy in private, he wanted to return to Warm Springs and “sleep and sleep and sleep.”

  The Big Three at Yalta, February 9, 1945. “We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for,” Harry Hopkins wrote, and the conference communiqué echoed that sentiment: the creation of the United Nations, it said, would “provide the greatest opportunity in all history” to secure a lasting peace.

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  U.S. Marines begin to blast their way inland on Iwo Jima, a little over a week after the Yalta talks ended. It would take five weeks and nearly seven thousand American lives before Japanese resistance on the tiny volcanic island ended.

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  On his way home from Yalta, FDR meets King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia aboard the USS Quincy, February 14, 1945. The ruler brought aboard “his whole court,” FDR reported to Daisy, “slaves (black), taster, astrologer & 8 live sheep. Whole party was a scream!” But the president had a serious purpose in mind: he wanted to probe the ruler’s willingness to allow displaced Jews from central Europe to settle in Palestine. Let them have the choicest lands and homes in Germany, instead, the king answered: “What injury have the Arabs done to the Jews of Europe? It is the ‘Christian’ Germans who stole their homes and lives. Let the Germans pay.”

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  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES The president reports to Congress on his meeting with Churchill and Stalin in Yalta, March 1, 1945. “I knew when he consented to do this sitting down,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, that he had finally “accepted a certain degree of invalidism.” Samuel Rosenman was startled that FDR often strayed from his written remarks and sometimes stumbled when trying to follow them. “It was quite obvious that the great fighting eloquence and oratory that had distinguished him in his campaign only four months before were lacking. The crushing effect of twelve years of the Presidency was beginning to be more and more evident.”

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  Slipping Away

  Roosevelt’s arrival at Warm Springs had always been a joyous occasion. This time was different. He slumped in his wheelchair, failed to wave at the townspeople who came out to see him, and felt like “absolutely dead weight” to the Secret Serviceman who lifted him into his car. Later, the stationmaster at Warm Springs would remember that the president had been “the worst-looking man I ever saw who was still alive. Just like a setting up dead man.”

  That evening, William Hassett told Dr. Bruenn, “The Boss is slipping away from us and no earthly power can save him.” Bruenn agreed that his patient was “precarious” but still hoped two weeks in Warm Springs might restore him as it had so many times before.

  For ten days, with Daisy Suckley and his cousin Laura Delano caring for him, FDR did his best to rest. But the president of the Philippines stopped in for lunch. There were cables back and forth between him and Churchill; it was already clear that Stalin was not going to make good on his promise to allow the Poles to decide their own future. And when the first lady called one evening, urging him to intervene personally to get arms to a particular band of Yugoslav partisans, she would not take no for an answer. When the president finally put the phone down after forty-five minutes, his blood pressure had risen fifty points.

  On April 9, Lucy Rutherfurd joined FDR at Warm Springs, bringing along her friend the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, whom she had commissioned to paint the president’s portrait.

  The lunch party the following day was “awfully nice,” Daisy wrote. “Everybody was cheerful and responsive and Franklin told stories to his heart’s content until 4 PM.… He went off to rest, came out at five, looking more tired than ever, and went out for a drive. He took Lucy and Fala with him, to [Dowdell’s] Knob. The best thing he could do. They sat in the sun, talking, for over an hour.”

  Back in Washington on Friday morning, April 12, 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt held her usual press conference at the White House. She laid out her crowded schedule for the next few days—beginning with the annual Thrift-Shop Tea that afternoon at the Sulgrave Club, dinner with the American Friends Committee, a tea for New York Democrats, a visit to a handicapped children’s clinic—and then she would join her husband for the San Francisco conference that was to form the United Nations. Nothing had so deeply interested her since the early days of the New Deal, she said.

  In Georgia, working over the final draft of a speech in the warm southern sun, FDR had been thinking about his own hopes for the postwar world.

  I remember saying, once upon a time in the long, long ago when I was a freshman, that the only thing our people had to fear was fear itself.

  We were in fear then of economic collapse. We struck back boldly against that fear, and we overcame it. …

  The work [now] my friends is peace. More than an end to this war—an end to the beginnings of all wars.… And to all Americans who dedicate themselves with us to the making of an abiding peace, I say:

  The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.

  Later that morning, when the president was wheeled into the living room of his cottage, Daisy thought he looked better than he had in days. So did Lucy Rutherfurd, Laura Delano, and Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who continued to work on his portrait. He stopped reading his mail to eat a little of the sweetened oatmeal his doctors thought might help improve his appetite, then returned to work.

  It was about 1:45. Lunch was to be served in fifteen minutes.

  Daisy looked up from her crocheting.

  Franklin seemed to be looking for something: his head forward, his hands fumbling. I went forward and looked into his face: “Have you dropped your cigarette?”

  He looked at me with his forehead furrowed in pain and tried to smile. He put his left hand up to the back of his head and said: “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.”

  Roosevelt lost consciousness. He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. The president was carried into his bedroom. Daisy called for the doctor. There was nothing anyone could do. Lucy Rutherfurd drove away with Elizabeth Shoumatoff as quickly as she could.

  “Three thirty-five P.M.,” Daisy wrote in her journal. “Franklin D. Roosevelt, the hope of the world, is dead. What this means to all who knew him personally, is impossible to put into words. What it means to the world, only the future can tell.”

  He was just sixty-three years old.

  The last photographs of Franklin Roosevelt, taken at Warm Springs by Nicholas Robbins, a photographer hired by the painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff to take pictures to aid her in her work. The two images of the president on the porch of his cottage were taken on April 10; the ones made inside date from the following day.

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  FDR, Daisy, and the president’s cousin Laura Delano ride through the Georgia countryside, March 31, 1945. Montgomery Snyder, the president’s personal chauffeur (now in uniform), is at the wheel, next to Charles Fredericks of the Secret Service. Roosevelt, who had once taken such pride in driving his own car, no longer felt up to it, and a windscreen now shielded him from the cold. “The country is beautiful in its new spring dress,” Daisy noted that evening, “lots of azaleas in bloom & some dogwood trees.”

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  In this photograph, taken by Daisy Suckley sometime during the president’s last week in Warm Springs, FDR goes through his mail in the living room of his cottage. It was in this chair, at this
card table, that he would suffer his fatal cerebral hemorrhage.

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  Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd sits for a photograph by Nicholas Robbins in the same living room, April 11, 1945. “The last I remember,” Roosevelt’s maid Lizzie McDuffie said after FDR died the following day, “he was looking into the smiling face of a beautiful woman.”

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  Going Home

  In Washington, at about 4:50 that afternoon, Eleanor Roosevelt was seated next to Woodrow Wilson’s widow at the Sulgrave Club, listening to a pianist at the Thrift-Shop Tea. Before she left the White House, Laura Delano had called from Georgia to tell her the president had “fainted,” but Admiral McIntire had urged her to go on with her schedule as if nothing had happened for fear of alarming anyone.

  Then, the mistress of ceremonies whispered that she had a telephone call. The president’s press secretary, Steve Early, asked her to come home immediately. “I did not even ask why,” she remembered. “I knew down in my heart that something dreadful had happened.”

  Early and Admiral McIntire told her that the president had slipped away.

  Vice President Truman arrived at the White House at five, not sure why he’d been summoned. “Harry,” Eleanor told him. “The president is dead.” After a moment, he asked if there was anything he could do for her. No, she said. “Is there anything we can do for you? For you’re the one in trouble now.”

  Eleanor wrote out a cable to be sent to her four sons overseas, then left for Warm Springs. In what may have been his very first act as president, Truman provided her with a military plane to fly to Fort Benning, not far from Warm Springs, even though she’d worried it might seem extravagant.

  At 5:48, the International News Service flashed WASHN—FDR DEAD. Within seconds, the bulletin was broadcast by CBS, NBC, and ABC radio.

  Theodore Roosevelt’s widow, Edith, immediately wired “Love and Sympathy” to Eleanor. The war years had mellowed her view of her late husband’s cousin. He was “a nice man,” she now said, and had turned out to be as conservative as Alexander Hamilton and as democratic as Theodore Roosevelt’s hero, Abraham Lincoln.

  Winston Churchill said, “I feel as if I had been struck a physical blow.” Stalin was “distressed”—and worried that someone had poisoned the president. Huddled in his bunker in Berlin, Hitler exulted. “See, the war is not lost!” he told an aide. He would be dead in eighteen days; his Reich would outlast him by only a week.

  Eleanor reached Warm Springs a little before midnight. She asked exactly what had happened. Laura Delano evidently told her that Mrs. Rutherfurd had been with her husband when he collapsed, that she and Franklin had seen one another several times over the last few years—and that her daughter, Anna, had sometimes secretly helped arrange those visits.

  Eleanor said nothing, but an old wound had been reopened, her sense that those who loved her would not do so for long had been reaffirmed. Not only had her husband again misled her, but so had others close to her, including her own daughter. “Mother was angry at Anna,” James Roosevelt would write. “But what was Anna to do? Should she have refused Father what he wanted? … A child caught between two parents can only pursue as honorable a course as possible.” It would take time for the two women to reconcile.

  Eleanor accompanied her husband’s body on the train that took it from Warm Springs to Washington and then on to Hyde Park, where he was to be buried in his mother’s rose garden as he had wished. Eleanor felt sorrow for the grieving Americans who lined the tracks outside her stateroom window. They made her understand for the first time how much her husband had meant to them: “I never realized the full scope of the devotion to him until after he died.”

  When the train stopped briefly at Charlotte, North Carolina, in the middle of the night, Boy Scouts on the brightly lit platform began to sing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Unseen in the darkness, thousands of men and women joined in. “Those people were scared to death,” Merriman Smith wrote. “They weren’t singing for a single departed soul. They were singing for themselves, to hold themselves up.” The younger people in that crowd could not remember an America without FDR; many couldn’t remember Harry Truman’s name; still more had no idea what he looked like. When the old hymn ended, another reporter noticed, the African Americans in the crowd, who had stood apart at one end of the platform, knelt together and began to sing a hymn of their own as the train began again to move. “Most of the blacks never got to vote for FDR,” another reporter noted, “but they came out late at night to pray for him.”

  Eleanor was impressed, but her own feelings, she wrote, remained “almost impersonal, perhaps because much further back I had had to face certain difficulties until I decided to accept the fact that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is … and you cannot live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be.”

  Later, she would make a more generous assessment of the man to whom she had been married for forty years.

  All human beings have failings, all human beings have needs and temptations and stresses. Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another’s failings: but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves. If at the end one can say: “This man used to the limit the powers that God … granted him; he was worthy of love and respect and of the sacrifice of many people, made in order that he might achieve what he deemed to be his task,” then that life has been lived well and there are no regrets.

  Chief Petty Officer Graham Jackson of the Coast Guard plays “Going Home” as the hearse bearing the president’s casket pauses in front of Georgia Hall so that scores of polio patients could say their final goodbyes. Jackson had been a favorite of the president’s, often called in to entertain when he was in Warm Springs.

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  Eleanor Roosevelt’s telegram to her four sons, composed moments after learning of her husband’s death: “Darlings Pa slept away this afternoon. He did his job to the end as he would want you to do. Bless you. All our love, Mother.”

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  At Greenville, South Carolina, crowds line both sides of the tracks to see the funeral train pass by on its way from Warm Springs to Washington.

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  Mourners on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., watch the funeral procession from Union Station to the White House move past. When one man fell to his knees, weeping, another asked if he’d known the president. “No,” he answered. “But he knew me.”

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  At Washington’s Union Station, an honor guard places the casket aboard the train that will finally take the president home to Hyde Park.

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  FDR’s White House desk, its surface forested with knickknacks, just as he left it before his final trip to Warm Springs

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  A caisson brings the president’s flag-draped casket past hemlock hedges into his mother’s rose garden. Eight hundred and eighty-three men from all the armed services lined the dirt road that led up from the woods below Springwood.

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  Eleanor and Anna at the funeral. “Poor E.R.,” Daisy Suckley wrote afterward. “I believe she loved [Franklin] more deeply than she knows herself, and his feeling for her was deep and lasting. The fact that they could not relax together, or play together, is the tragedy of their joint lives, for I believe, from everything that I have seen of them, that they had everything else in common. It was … a matter of personalities.… I cannot blame either of them.”

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  We Have to Start Again

  A week after her husband’s death, Eleanor took time out from packing her family’s belongings to write to her friend Lorena Hickok.

  Hick dearest,

  The Trumans have just been to lunch and nearly all that I can do is done. The upstairs looks desolate and I will be glad to leave tomorrow. It is empty and without purpose to be here n
ow.… Franklin’s death ended a period in history and now in its wake for lots of us who lived in his shadow … we have to start again under our own momentum and wonder what we can achieve.

  Much love dear,

  E.R.

  A few days later, she emerged from her New York apartment on Washington Square to find a newspaperwoman waiting on the sidewalk. “The story is over,” Eleanor said gently, and hurried on.

  But in some sense it was just starting. The atomic bomb would end the war in the Pacific. FDR had given the go-ahead to build it because he feared the Nazis would build one first. And Mrs. Roosevelt had no quarrel with President Truman’s decision to use it. But she also understood that when the bomb fell, a new world had been born, “a world,” she wrote, “in which we [have] to learn to live in friendship with our neighbors of every race, creed or color, or … do away with civilization.” And she was determined to help build that world.

  She was willing to appear in her ceremonial role as the president’s widow, just as she had once stood in for her husband in Albany and Washington. It was an important way to keep his liberal legacy alive. But ceremony alone had never held much interest for Eleanor Roosevelt. Like her uncle Theodore, she craved action.

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES In her public role as the president’s widow, Eleanor Roosevelt christens the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt just seventeen days after his death; and, three years later, joins King George VI in unveiling a statue of FDR in London’s Grosvenor Square.