“I forgot to tell you,” she went on, “that Elinor Morgenthau had a serious heart attack at Daytona, Florida and Henry has been terribly worried. I think Elinor can’t stand the war strain and trying not to show it has had an effect on her circulation . . . . I haven’t felt sleepy tonight so I’ve written James, Elliott, and Frankie, Elinor, Rommie and Sisty and now I must go to bed as we leave in the morning and go up to New Hampshire tomorrow night and I’ll be in Washington Wed. eve.”
“Much love to you dear,” she concluded. “I’m so glad you are gaining. You sounded cheerful for the first time last night and I hope you’ll weigh 170 lbs when you return.”
Unbeknownst to Eleanor, Franklin’s good cheer that Saturday night was likely prompted by the knowledge that Lucy Rutherfurd was coming to see him on Monday. Phone logs at the FDR Library reveal that Roosevelt called Lucy in Aiken almost every day while he was at Warm Springs. She was planning to drive to Warm Springs on Monday, April 9, with her painter friend, Elizabeth Shoumatoff. Roosevelt told her he would meet their car in Macon at 4 p.m. The roads were tricky, however, and the two women lost their way, arriving quite late. “Nothing in sight,” Shoumatoff observed, no presidential cars, no limousines. “Nobody loves us,” Lucy joked, “nobody cares for us.” Continuing on toward Warm Springs, they noticed a crowd gathered in front of a corner drugstore in the small village of Greenville. Franklin Roosevelt was sitting in an open car with Margaret Suckley and Fala, drinking a Coca-Cola. Shoumatoff was struck at once by “the expression of joy on FDR’s face upon seeing Lucy,” and by Lucy’s relief in knowing that Roosevelt had not forgotten her after all.
Dinner that night, Shoumatoff recalled, found Roosevelt “full of jokes,” basking in the admiration of four women (Margaret and Laura had been invited to join Lucy and her friend). Shoumatoff’s eye was drawn to Laura’s exotic looks, her bright-blue hair, her striking dinner pajamas, and her “profile as beautiful as a cameo,” but Roosevelt, she noted, seemed constantly to address himself to Lucy, in a wide-ranging conversation that moved from Churchill to Stalin to food.
The next morning, while Roosevelt sat on the sun porch working on his papers, Shoumatoff began preliminary sketches for a portrait which Lucy wanted to give to her daughter, Barbara. Even as Shoumatoff sketched, Roosevelt continued joking with Lucy. Watching the affectionate rapport between them, Shoumatoff’s photographer, Harold Robbins, whom she had brought along to help her with her work, thought they were like “happy kids enjoying golden days as if there would be no end to them.”
In the afternoon, Roosevelt took the four women for a long drive in his open coupe. Along the way, he encountered Merriman Smith riding a horse which he had hired for the afternoon at the village drugstore. “As I reined in the horse,” Smith recalled, “Roosevelt bowed majestically to me. His voice was wonderful and resonant. It sounded like the Roosevelt of old. In tones that must have been audible a block away, FDR hailed me with ‘Heigh-Ho, Silver!’”
After dinner, Roosevelt gave Lucy a photograph taken when the two of them had first met, when he was assistant secretary of the navy. As Shoumatoff looked at the picture of the handsome young Roosevelt and then at Lucy’s “beautiful, slightly flushed face,” she felt happy for them. “The quiet and beauty of the place,” she later wrote, “the privacy of the surroundings, seemed almost created for the new blossoming of those old memories.”
The following day, April 11, Roosevelt was in high spirits as he worked on a draft of his Jefferson Day speech. “I remember so clearly seeing him writing and writing,” Suckley recalled years later, “a little bent over the table, Miss Tully waiting by his side, pencil in hand . . . . Then, when he had finished, I remember distinctly how he came into the room from the porch, a look of great satisfaction on his face, and said, ‘Well, I’ve written much of that speech in my own hand.’”
It was “a good speech,” Hassett recorded, fueled, as most of Roosevelt’s speeches were, by a striking combination of optimism and belief in the American people. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Roosevelt had said in his famous first inaugural; and now, in the peroration of the last speech he would write, he returned to the same theme. “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow,” he wrote, “will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”
That evening, Henry Morgenthau, in transit to Washington from Florida, joined Roosevelt and the four women for cocktails and dinner. “I was terribly shocked when I saw him,” Morgenthau recorded in his diary. “I found he had aged terrifically and looked very haggard. His hands shook so that he started to knock over the glasses. I had to hold each glass as he poured out the cocktail . . . . I have never seen him have so much difficulty transferring himself from his wheelchair to a regular chair, and I was in agony watching him.”
After two cocktails, Roosevelt seemed to improve. He was in good spirits when he called Anna in Washington to check on Johnny’s progress. “He was full of this wonderful barbecue that was coming off the next day,” Anna recalled. “The only bad thing about it,” he told her, was that he knew ahead of time that he was going to overeat, but he intended to “thoroughly enjoy it.”
The conversation at supper was lively and agreeable, though Shoumatoff detected “an encompassing tension” which she attributed to Morgenthau’s presence. As soon as the outsider left, “the atmosphere resumed its former easy and pleasant manner.” With Roosevelt settled comfortably in an armchair by the fireplace, Shoumatoff volunteered to tell her favorite ghost story about the black-pearl necklace of Catherine the Great. “Upon finishing my story,” Shoumatoff recalled, “another was about to be told when Dr. Bruenn and his assistant arrived. The President, like a little boy, asked to stay up longer, but finally consented to retire, telling me he would be ready for my painting the next morning.”
“The sky was clear” in Warm Springs on April 12, 1945, Suckley recalled, “with the promise of a hot day.” At noon, the president was sitting in his living room with Lucy, Laura, and Margaret while Shoumatoff stood at her easel, painting. Shoumatoff was struck by his “exceptionally good color”; Suckley, too, thought he looked “surprisingly well, and very fine in a double breasted gray suit and crimson tie.”
The mail was heavy; a stack of letters and documents awaited the president’s signature. Hassett took each paper as it was signed and spread it on a chair for the ink to dry. “Well,” Roosevelt teased, “are you through with your laundry yet? Is it all dry?” Among the documents was a letter prepared for the president’s signature by the State Department. “A typical State Department letter,” Roosevelt laughingly observed. “It says nothing at all.” His spirits remained high as he came to a bill just passed by Congress which extended the life of the Commodity Credit Corporation. “There,” he boasted to the women as he signed his name with a flourish, “there is where I make a law.”
At that moment, Lizzie McDuffie, the president’s maid, was walking to the guest cottage to make the beds. Looking through the living-room window, she saw Roosevelt sitting in his chair, laughing and smiling at Lucy. “The last I remember,” Lizzie said later, “he was looking into the smiling face of a beautiful woman.”
At one o’clock, the butler came in to set the table for lunch. Roosevelt glanced at his watch and said, “We’ve got just fifteen minutes more.” Then, suddenly, Shoumatoff recalled, “he raised his right hand and passed it over his forehead several times in a strange jerky way.” Then his head went forward. Thinking he was looking for something, Suckley went over to him and asked if he had dropped his cigarette. “He looked at me,” Suckley recalled, “his forehead furrowed with 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.’ And then he collapsed.”
Suckley reached for the telephone and asked the operator to find Dr. Bruenn and send him over at once. In the meantime, the president’s valet, Arthur Prettyman, and the butler carried the unconscious president in
to the bedroom. When Dr. Bruenn arrived, he could tell at once that the president had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. “It was a bolt out of the blue,” Bruenn later observed. “A good deal of his brain had been damaged.”
Lucy and the other women were still standing in the living room. “The confusion was so great,” Shoumatoff recalled. “Nobody seemed to know whether they were coming or going.”
“We must pack up and go,” Lucy whispered to Shoumatoff. “The family is arriving by plane and the rooms must be vacant. We must get to Aiken before dark.” In a few moments, Shoumatoff recalled, she and Lucy were back in the guest cottage, hurriedly tossing their things into suitcases. It was about two-thirty when they left.
In the bedroom, Bruenn did what he could, “which wasn’t much,” he admitted. He notified Dr. McIntire, who placed an emergency call to Atlanta to Dr. James Paullin, who had been part of the team that examined Roosevelt at Bethesda Naval Hospital the previous year. Bruenn took off the president’s clothes and put on his pajamas. By the time Grace Tully reached the house, there were terrible sounds of tortured breathing coming from the bedroom. “All you could hear was breathing,” Lizzie McDuffie recalled. “It was kind of like—deep, steady, long gasps.”
Tully dropped her head to pray while Hassett went into the bedroom. “His eyes were closed,” Hassett recorded, “mouth open—the awful breathing . . . But the Greek nose and the noble forehead were grand as ever . . . . I knew that I should not see him again.”
Shortly before three-thirty, Roosevelt’s breathing stopped. Dr. Bruenn was on the bed giving him artificial respiration when Dr. Paullin arrived. “We put a shot of adrenaline into his heart,” Bruenn recalled—“sometimes that starts the heart up again—nothing worked. And that was it.” The president was dead.
• • •
Hassett called the White House to break the news to Press Secretary Steve Early. The two men agreed to say nothing more until Eleanor was told. Dr. McIntire had called her an hour earlier to tell her that Roosevelt had fainted. The doctor was “not alarmed,” Eleanor recalled, but suggested she prepare to go to Warm Springs that evening. Should she cancel her speaking engagement at four that afternoon? Eleanor asked. No, McIntire insisted, it would cause great comment if she canceled and then at the last minute flew to Warm Springs.
Arriving at the Sulgrave Club promptly at 4 p.m., Eleanor took a seat between Mrs. Woodrow Wilson and Mrs. Allen Dougherty, chairman of the charity event. Dressed in a soft red suit which one reporter described as “unusually smart,” Eleanor delivered a short talk and then returned to the head table to listen as the celebrated pianist Miss Evelyn Tyner played. In the middle of the piece, Eleanor was told she was wanted on the telephone. The message gave her “a quick start,” one of the ladies seated nearby later recalled.
Quietly excusing herself, Eleanor went to the phone. Steve Early was on the line. He was “very much upset,” Eleanor recalled, and he “asked me to come home at once. I did not even ask why. I knew down in the heart that something dreadful had happened. Nevertheless the amenities had to be observed, so I went back to the party . . . .”
Resuming her place at the head table, Eleanor waited until Miss Tyner’s piano piece was completed, joined in the applause, and then rose to say, “Now I’m called back to the White House and I want to apologize for leaving before this delightful concert is finished.” The audience gave her a standing ovation and she left the room.
“I got into the car and sat with clenched hands all the way to the White House. In my heart I knew what had happened, but one does not actually formulate these terrible thoughts until they are spoken. I went to my sitting room and Steve Early and Dr. McIntire came to tell me the news.”
Anna was at Bethesda Naval Hospital with Johnny when she heard. She had been told by Dr. McIntire earlier in the afternoon that her father had collapsed, but since there was nothing she could do she had returned to the hospital. “I hadn’t been there more than about twenty minutes,” she recalled, “when the head of the Naval Center Hospital, in Bethesda, came and only said one sentence, ‘Mrs. Boettiger, my car’s waiting to take you to the White House.’ And he’d been told, too, obviously. And that is the way it was done.”
When she got back to the White House, Anna went to her mother’s sitting room. Eleanor had already changed into a black dress, sent for the vice-president, and cabled her four sons, all in active service. “He did his job to the end,” she wrote, “as he would want you to do.” In the midst of indescribable confusion, she had the presence of mind to call the hospital in Daytona Beach where Elinor Morgenthau lay ill to ask that the radio be removed from her room lest Elinor hear the news and suffer a setback.
At five-thirty, Vice-President Harry Truman arrived at the White House, not knowing why he had been asked to come. He was ushered into the first lady’s sitting room where Eleanor was waiting with Anna, John and Steve Early. Eleanor stepped forward to greet him, placing her arm gently on his shoulder. “Harry,” she said, “the President is dead.” For a moment Truman was unable to speak. Then, at last, he found his voice to ask if there was anything he could do for her.
In reply, Eleanor said: “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.” She told Truman she was planning to fly to Warm Springs that night and wondered if it was still proper for her to use a government plane. Truman assured her that it was. Minutes later, Stettinius came to the doorway. With tears streaming down his face, he discussed the plans to assemble the Cabinet and swear in the new president.
By 7 p.m., nearly all the members of the Cabinet were gathered in the Cabinet Room, along with Chief Justice Harlan Stone. “It was a very somber group,” Stimson recorded, as he looked at the faces of Morgenthau, Biddle, Ickes, Perkins, and Stettinius. “For with all his idiosyncrasies our Chief was a very kindly and friendly man and his humor and pleasantry had always been the life of the Cabinet meetings. I think every one of us felt keenly the loss of a real personal friend. I know I did. I have never concealed the fact that I regarded his administrative procedures as disorderly, but his foreign policy was always founded on great foresight and keenness of vision, and at this period of great confusion of ideas in this country, the loss of his leadership will be most serious.”
Minutes after the swearing in, Eleanor left for Warm Springs. When she appeared at the front portico of the White House, she talked for a few minutes with Anna, who was staying behind to coordinate plans for the funeral service. Heading toward the car, she leaned over to recognize the clustered group of ushers, doormen, and women reporters who stood there. “A trooper to the last,” reporter Bess Furman marveled. Then she kissed Anna goodbye and “strode with her usual determined gait to the waiting limo. Silent and alone, she went to her husband.”
Harry Hopkins was still at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, when he heard the news. Frail as he was, he made plans to fly immediately to Washington. Then, from his hospital bed, he began calling his friends, feeling a desperate need to talk about Roosevelt. “You and I have got something great we can take with us the rest of our lives,” he told Robert Sherwood. “It’s a great realization because we know it’s true what so many people believed about him and what made them love him. The President never let them down. That’s what you and I can remember.”
“Oh, we all know he could be exasperating,” Hopkins went on, “and he could seem to be temporizing and delaying and he’d get us all worked up when we thought he was making too many concessions to expediency. But all of that was in the little things, the unimportant things—and he knew exactly how little and how unimportant they really were. But in the big things—all the things that were of real, permanent importance—he never let the people down.”
It was after midnight in London when Churchill heard that Roosevelt was dead. “I felt as if I had been struck a physical blow,” Churchill recalled. “My relations with this shining personality had played so large a part in the long, terrible years we had worked togeth
er. Now they had come to an end, and I was overpowered by a sense of deep and irreparable loss.”
In Moscow, Ambassador Harriman learned of Roosevelt’s death at about 3 a.m. local time. He drove to the Kremlin to tell Stalin. The Russian leader appeared “deeply distressed,” Harriman recorded, holding the envoy’s hand for nearly thirty seconds before asking him to sit and talk. Stalin then questioned Harriman closely about the circumstances of Roosevelt’s death and sent a message to the State Department asking that an autopsy be performed to determine if Roosevelt had been poisoned.
As word spread from city to town within the United States, ordinary people, politicians and reporters struggled to come to terms with Roosevelt’s death. For the millions who adored him and for those who despised him, an America without Roosevelt seemed almost inconceivable. He was in his thirteenth year as president when he died. Those who had just reached the legal voting age of twenty-one in time for this fourth election had been only nine years old when he took the oath of office for the first time. Schoolgirl Anne Relph remembered riding her bicycle back to the playground after hearing that Roosevelt had died, “and feeling, as a child, that this was going to be the end of the world, because he was the only president I’d ever known. I was almost not aware that there could be another president. He had always been THE PRESIDENT, in capital letters.”
Correspondent I. F. Stone was at the PM newspaper office in New York when a copy boy ran out of the wire room with a piece of United Press copy confirming the president’s death. “That first flash,” Stone recalled, “seemed incredible; like something in a nightmare, for down under the horror was the comfortable feeling that you would wake to find it all a dream. The Romans must have felt this way when word came that Caesar Augustus was dead.” Journalist Studs Terkel heard the news while he was having drinks in the Stevens Hotel. “Everybody left. I’m walking south on Michigan Boulevard, and I can’t stop crying. Everybody is crying.” Reporter Jack Altschul was in his office at Newsday, “God, there were people in the office who were professed Republicans and may have come from stockbroking families who have never forgiven Roosevelt . . . but I can remember going with some of the guys to the bar where we used to hang out after we put out the new edition, and the guys were crying.”
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