“He wouldn’t.”
“So who would?”
The answer came to Lammeck like an artillery shell, with a disheartening whoosh out of the air. Judith must have seen the shock on his face. She laid an open hand to his cheek. Lammeck was too stunned to avoid her touch.
“Poor Mikhal,” she murmured. “Have you never been jilted?”
He stared past her, outside the hazy pub into the world where this impossibility came from.
“Churchill.”
Judith left her palm against his skin. Gently she said, “I can’t say if it was Churchill. But, yes, it was England.”
“It wasn’t about gaining power,” Lammeck said as the reason exploded on him. “It was to stop the loss of power.”
“Dead on.” She withdrew her hand.
“Before the war, Britain was one of the strongest nations in the world. Now, after the war, their whole empire’s going to be broken up. Churchill wants to keep the status quo, the old European balance of power. But Roosevelt intended to use the UN to end colonialism. The only thing Churchill had left to protect British interests was his alliance with America. Then, under Roosevelt, after Malta, that alliance shifted to the Soviets. So Roosevelt had to go.”
“He was too tired, Mikhal, too sick. He was a frail, dying old man. I saw him with my own eyes. He wasn’t going to be strong enough to be an effective force to help check Stalin. The British saw this at Tehran, again at Yalta. The time is now, the forces are moving. They figured Truman could only turn out better. Roosevelt was a great man, and a great president for America. I’m sure you historians will forgive him for the weaknesses of these past few years. But he wasn’t an Englishman, and the once-great English can never forgive.”
”Your accomplice, Maude King. An anticommunist.”
“Vehemently so, I was told. She was recruited years ago, just in case.”
“Why didn’t they send you to kill Stalin instead?”
Judith shook her head. “A change of power in Communist Russia would affect nothing, Mikhal. The problem there is systemic; they all think alike. In America, a new President might just make a difference. And...” She paused, scratching her chin with a painted nail, “let’s be honest: Stalin wouldn’t have been so easy to kill.”
Lammeck took up his beer. Judith had already finished her stout. He helped his throat to a long draught, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“How does something like this happen? Did Churchill actually tell someone to murder Roosevelt? I can’t believe that.”
Judith shrugged. “One day Henry II was sitting with some of his knights, complaining about his maverick archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. He said, ‘What cowards have I around me that no one will rid me of this lowborn priest?’ Who knows if he meant it or he was just letting off steam. In any case, his boys took him at his word...”
”... and Becket was murdered in the cathedral.”
”And became a saint. So it goes. Perhaps Churchill did nothing more than growl around one of his cigars one evening about how he wished such and such might befall Roosevelt. The wrong words in the right ears, and here we are.” Judith whirled her hands. “Abracadabra. History.”
The historian and the assassin sat with emptied glasses. Lammeck struggled with the immensity of what she’d just told him. He believed her; it added up.
”So, Professor. Have you made up your mind?”
”About what ?”
“What drives history, events or individuals? Don’t look so surprised; remember I’ve read your work. What do you think? Am I a free agent of change or just a cog of history? When I killed Roosevelt, did I move the mountain of the future even an inch left or right? Or is the mountain still in the same spot? I’d love to know what you think. Please.”
Lammeck eyed her. He enjoyed a quiet moment of irony, the theoretical assassin asking him his theory of assassinations.
“For the last five thousand years,” he said, “until recently, surprisingly few people have actually affected world events. Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, the great religions’ prophets. A few dozen scientists. The wheel, gunpowder, electricity, steam and coal power, the cross, the Bible, the Koran—each of them transformed societies to their very core. But it’s hard to come up with more than a handful of political leaders who have significantly affected the course of global history by living or dying. Movements rise and fade, conquerors win and lose. Few leaders prove irreplaceable. That’s because power always comes from the people, even religious power, and it has vast momentum. Power is not a nimble thing. The ruling class understand that. But changes within the ruling class rarely alter their style of ruling, because they all end up thinking essentially alike. It’s exactly the way you described how futile it would be to assassinate Stalin and make any difference in the Soviet Union. Or the Roman Empire’s Caesars. Then there’s always the counterweight to the ruling class, the radicals. Whenever the ruling class loses touch with the people, they protect their power by coercion and repression. These invariably give common cause to malcontents, who are themselves members of a class. As such, they’re also interchangeable. One oppressed radical or another, just like one ruler, has turned out to be as good or bad as the next, with only varying degrees of vision and charisma.”
Judith narrowed her eyes. “You mentioned ‘recently.’ What about it? And this better be good. I don’t want to hear I’ve been wasting my time.”
”Democracy changed everything. Over the last two centuries the real experiment with politics has been America. Europe comes close, but the Europeans’ support of royal families and their status as colonial powers has perverted it. In the United States, the first nation on earth with no kings or queens, in what’s become an open marketplace of competing ideas, the radicals themselves often get to be the rulers. But not like Lenin and his Communists. They may have harnessed widespread unrest, but they took control through bloodshed, and have to maintain it at the end of a cannon. That can’t last. But America will. Because for the first time and place in history, one man or woman can make a difference based not on birthright or the size of an army, but solely by the power of an idea itself. And because of America’s size and power, especially now after a victorious world war and the reduction of other traditional powers, the ideas of the American leadership will have global impact. A change in the presidency will affect hundreds of millions, for generations to come. Not since Rome has there been that kind of concentrated power. The difference is that in Rome, men ruled. In America, ideas rule. When you remove one man, you replace him with another. When you remove an idea, history changes. You may have committed the first assassination in all of recorded history that will actually have a profound political effect on the entire planet.”
She fanned herself. “Me? Did you all learn this from me? Truly?”
”It’s all I’ve been thinking about since I got back to my work.”
”Well, you certainly take a girl’s breath away. That was a beautiful lecture, Professor. I’m sorry I can’t take your class. Now ask me what I’ve learned.”
Lammeck tipped his head, to give her the implied question.
“I’ve killed thirteen men and women on assignment in my career. Four times that many, when you count the incidental deaths. Not in a single instance did I question myself about whether it was the right thing to do. Not once did I hesitate. Except for this last job. I let one frail old man live a few extra days. I took pity on him, frankly. You showed up a minute after I poisoned him. One little minute, Mikhal. I barely managed to get away. You know what that told me? That Allah still loves me. But it’s clear that His love is down to one minute. I no longer can resist my doubts. So I can no longer be a part of history. History is not made by doubters. Only those without misgivings may stay. So,” she asked, “what of your misgivings? What are you going to do?”
Lammeck cast himself forward into a future where he wrote what he knew. Where he hung in his gallery of assassination this folded FBI poster of Judith, b
elow an image of Franklin Roosevelt. Where he charged England with the murder of an American president. He’d face derision, expulsion from academia, and, probably, some cold night, he’d face Dag or his British equivalent, maybe another of his own SOE trainees. In time, maybe a long time past his life, he’d be proven right. He’d be famous, with a name, known forever as the man who’d brought to light one of the great assassinations of the modern era.
“Before I answer that, I’ve got one more question for you. Why tell me? I know you made me a promise, but why keep it? If what you’ve done were made public, if people believed it, the impact would be...” Lammeck searched for a word to encompass the circumstances, “... incalculable.”
Judith reached to the seat beside her, lifting her broad straw hat. “As I said, I don’t know what the right thing is anymore. Killing clouds that in you. So I brought the truth to you. I believe you’ll do the right thing. You’re that kind of man.”
Silently, Lammeck asked the same question Judith had answered in the woods: What did history need? Would it be served by exposing England? Would history be changed by the knowledge of this crime—and if so, for the better? And, not as important but more immediate, did history need Mikhal Lammeck, and—despite her confidence to the contrary—possibly Judith, alive or dead?
“You want to know what I’m going to do?” Lammeck gestured for her to set down her hat. “What I should have done five months ago when Dag came to drag me into this.”
Lifting his hand higher, he caught the old bartender’s attention across the tavern and called for two more beers.
* * * *
AFTERWORD
President Franklin D. Roosevelt collapsed at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, at 1:15 p.m., on April 12, 1945. He was attended medically by Lieutenant Commander George Fox, pharmacist and masseur, and Lieutenant Commander Howard Bruenn, cardiologist, USNR. Due to the emergency, an internist, Dr. James Paullin, was called to come from Atlanta.
Over the next two hours, Roosevelt’s condition worsened. Systolic blood pressure skyrocketed to 300, the limit the cuff could read; pulse quickened to 104. His left eye began to dilate. Roosevelt’s bladder emptied. His breathing struggled, in a deep, rhythmic snore. Bruenn injected aminophylline and nitroglycerine into Roosevelt’s arm to expand the arteries and lower blood pressure. His diagnosis was a massive cerebral hemorrhage in the occipital area, a stroke caused by a clot or a hardened artery that had broken and spilled blood into the skull, pressing on the President’s brain.
By 2:45, FDR’s blood pressure had dropped to 240/120; his pulse to 90 bpm. His breathing became irregular, with frequent pauses. His body snapped in and out of rigidity.
Dr. Paullin arrived at the Little White House at 3:30. The internist strode directly to the President’s bedroom, where, within minutes, Roosevelt stopped breathing. Paullin injected a syringe of adrenaline straight into Roosevelt’s heart. Through a stethoscope, Paullin heard only a few more heartbeats, then nothing. Dr. Bruenn listened for another minute and found no response. Paullin tried a blood pressure cuff and got no reading.
At 3:35 CWT, Dr. Bruenn pronounced, “This man is dead.”
In Roosevelt’s little bedroom, on the bedside table, lay a book, The Punch and Judy Murders, by Carter Dickson, opened to page 78, the beginning of a chapter headed “Six Feet of Earth.”
* * * *
ON THE FUNERAL TRAIN north from Warm Springs, cousins Delano and Suckley sat with Eleanor to keep her company. During their talk, Delano informed Eleanor that Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd House had been visiting the Little White House when the President succumbed, and also that Lucy had been a frequent visitor to the White House with the knowledge and assistance of daughter Anna. Delano’s rationale was that “Eleanor would have found out anyway.” In fact, Eleanor was the only close family member, and just one of a few White House intimates, who did not know of Lucy’s return into her husband’s life.
Eleanor and daughter Anna Boettiger became estranged for years afterward, but later reconciled.
Eleanor died in 1962, revered as one of the great citizens of the world. Among the possessions found in her New York apartment, on her bedside table, was a clipping of a poem, “Psyche,” by Virginia Moore:
The soul that has believed
And is deceived
Thinks nothing for a while,
All thoughts are vile.
And then because the sun
Is mute persuasion,
And hope in Spring and Fall
Most natural,
The soul grows calm and mild,
A little child,
Finding the pull of breath
Better than death...
The soul that had believed
And was decieved
Ends by believing more
Than ever before.
Across the top of the clipping, in Eleanor’s hand, had been scrawled the notation 1918, the year she discovered the affair between her husband and Lucy Mercer.
* * * *
ROOSEVELT WAS LAID TO rest in his mother’s rose garden at the family home in Hyde Park, New York. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not attend the funeral. He did not visit Roosevelt’s grave at Hyde Park until March 12, 1946.
Churchill lived another two decades. He was voted out of office just eight weeks after the end of the war in Europe, losing to the Labour candidate Clement Atlee. He became the Western world’s leading bellwether against the spread of communism. In October 1951, Churchill was again elected prime minister, serving until 1955.
Upon his return from Yalta, Churchill remarked to his foreign secretary Anthony Eden, who insisted that pressure be put on Roosevelt to insist that Stalin keep his Yalta agreements, “I am no longer fully heard by him [Roosevelt].”
Later, in his memoirs, Churchill considered the effect of FDR’s declining health on the lowering of what he called “The Iron Curtain” across the middle of Europe:
We can now see the deadly hiatus which existed between the fading of President Roosevelt’s strength and the growth of President Truman’s grip of the vast world problem. In this melancholy void, one President could not act and the other could not know.
Before his own death on January 24, 1965, Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature, accepted the Order of the Garter, and became an honorary citizen of the United States.
* * * *
SHORTLY AFTER FDR’S DEATH, Eleanor Roosevelt sent through cousin Daisy Suckley a small Shoumatoff portrait of her husband to Lucy Rutherfurd. From Aiken, May 2, 1945, Lucy wrote to Eleanor the following note:
DEAR ELEANOR,
Margaret Suckley has written me that you gave her the little water color of Franklin by Mme. Shoumatoff to send me. Thank you so very much—you must know that it will be treasured always—
I have wanted to write you for a long time to tell you that I had seen Franklin and of his great kindness about my husband when he was desperately ill in Washington, & of how helpful he was too, to his boys—and that I hoped so very much that I might see you again.
I can’t tell you how I feel for you and how constantly I think of your sorrow—you—whom I have always felt to be the most blessed and privileged of women—must now feel immeasurable grief and pain and they must be almost unbearable—
The whole universe finds it difficult to adjust itself to a world without Franklin—and to you and to his family—the emptiness must be appalling—
I send you—as I find it impossible not to—my love and my deep sympathy.
As always—
Affectionately,
Lucy Rutherfurd*
Roosevelt’s daughter Anna arranged for Lucy to visit Roosevelt’s grave in Hyde Park on June 9,1945. On that day, Lucy was stopped by a guard, who advised her that her admission card was not valid, though it was signed by Anna Boettiger, Roosevelt’s daughter. The guard telephoned Eleanor to obtain permission for Lucy to visit FDR’s grave. Eleanor granted the request.
In 1945, L
ucy told Madame Shoumatoff that she had burned all of FDR’s letters.
Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd died of leukemia in New York City, on July 31, 1948, at the age of fifty-seven.
* Lucy Rutherfurd to Eleanor Roosevelt, May 2, 1945; file: Russey-Ruz; General Correspondence, 1945-52; Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Part II: April 12, 1945-64, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
* * * *
SHOUMATOFF’S PAINTING, WHICH HAS become known as The Unfinished Portrait, is on display at the museum of the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia.
Immediately upon learning of the President’s death from U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman, Josef Stalin held the ambassador’s hand for thirty seconds before asking him to sit. Stalin queried Harriman about the circumstances of Roosevelt’s death, then sent a message to the U.S. State Department requesting that an autopsy be performed to ascertain if Roosevelt had been poisoned. [Author’s note: It does not strain credulity that Marshal Stalin recognized the handiwork of an assassin, having employed several himself.]
The Assassins Gallery - [Dr Mikhal Lammeck 01] Page 42