by A. J. Baime
The Soviet dictator refused any compromise. His puppet government in Poland would remain. “Matters on the Polish question,” Stalin cabled Roosevelt, “have really reached a dead end.” Then Stalin made a stunning allegation, that the Anglo-American forces had attempted to negotiate a surrender with the Nazis without Russian participation, at a meeting Stalin claimed had occurred in Berne, Switzerland. This would enable, he claimed, Anglo-American forces to march into Nazi-occupied territory unharmed on the western front, while the Nazis continued to fight and kill Soviet troops on the eastern front. The Americans, Stalin believed, had betrayed their Russian allies.
Roosevelt assured Stalin that no such negotiations had taken place, but Stalin refused to believe it.* “It may be assumed that you have not been fully informed,” Stalin cabled Roosevelt on April 3. “As a result of this at the present moment the Germans on the Western front in fact have ceased the war against England and the United States. At the same time they continue the war with Russia.” (This claim was obviously false.) The situation, Stalin wrote, had caused “an atmosphere of fear and distrust” between the Soviets and the Americans.
The president responded with a furious cable two days later. “I have received with astonishment your message of April 3,” he communicated. “I have told you that . . . no negotiations were held at Berne . . . It is astonishing that a belief seems to have reached the Soviet Government that I have entered into an agreement with the enemy without first obtaining your full agreement . . . Frankly I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”
Over the next few days the tension softened. Roosevelt attempted to end the feud graciously. “There must not, in any event, be mutual distrust and minor misunderstandings of this character . . . in the future,” he wrote Stalin. Privately, he had come to a grave conclusion. “Averell [Harriman] is right,” Roosevelt said of his Moscow ambassador. “We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.”
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Nothing like this had ever occurred—such outspoken vitriol between the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States. And the turning of events had occurred with frightening alacrity. Two months earlier, at the end of the Yalta Conference, America felt a glow of optimism, specifically with regard to United States–Soviet relations. “We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for and talking about for so many years,” professed Harry Hopkins, arguably Roosevelt’s closest friend and aide. “We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of the peace—and by ‘we,’ I mean all of us, the whole civilized human race.”
Just two months later, all the security that American and British officials felt regarding the Soviets had vanished. Stalin’s victories over the Nazis in eastern Europe had empowered him as never before. As Churchill described the mood in April 1945: “The two months that had passed since then [Yalta] had seen tremendous changes cutting to the very roots of thought . . . The whole relationship of Russia with the western Allies was in flux. Every question about the future was unsettled between us. The agreements and understandings at Yalta, such as they were, had already been broken or brushed aside by the triumphant Kremlin. New perils, perhaps as terrible as those we had surmounted, loomed and glared upon the torn and harassed world.”
Americans were aware of this turning of events, but only of the surface details reported in their newspapers. A majority of them had long since placed their faith in their president to surmount such problems. In the future, many historians would look back on the Roosevelt presidency and find his greatest fault to be his failure to brief his vice president on the critical shift in global affairs, for Roosevelt would not live to see this narrative play out.
Just before noon on April 12, crusty and bespectacled Bill Hassett, the president’s correspondence secretary, arrived at Roosevelt’s cottage with the White House mail pouch. By this time Roosevelt was sitting in his wheelchair by a crackling fire. He was cold, even though the morning had ushered in an unseasonably warm Georgia spring day. He wore a gray blazer and a vest over his red Harvard tie, and he was holding court with three women. There were his cousins Margaret “Daisy” Suckley and Laura Delano. The third was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, a widow and an old flame of FDR’s (Mrs. Roosevelt was unaware of Rutherfurd’s presence in the cottage).
Hassett began to pass Roosevelt papers from the pouch. Here was a State Department document that required his signature. “A typical State Department letter,” Roosevelt said mockingly. “It says nothing at all.” When Hassett handed the president Senate Bill 298 (which would increase the borrowing power of the Commodity Credit Corporation), Roosevelt smiled at his female guests. “Here’s where I make law,” he said. He placed the document on a card table and wrote “Approved” along with the date and his signature.
As he signed documents, Hassett spread them out on a table so the ink would dry. Roosevelt’s transportation secretary, Dewey Long, appeared, attempting to get the president’s attention regarding travel logistics for an upcoming conference in San Francisco. The conference was to be a crowning moment for Roosevelt, as dignitaries from all over the globe would soon be arriving to try to hammer out agreements for a new world peace organization called the United Nations. The conference was set to open in thirteen days, on April 25, and Roosevelt had already begun work on the speech he intended to give. FDR had no patience for travel logistics, focusing instead on the pile of documents requiring his attention.
Among these documents was a top-secret cable from his Moscow ambassador, Averell Harriman, regarding the president’s communiqué to Stalin from the day before. Harriman had held up this cable to Stalin and was now suggesting a rewording. He objected to the word minor in the following statement: “There must not, in any event, be mutual distrust and minor misunderstandings of this character . . . in the future.”
“May I respectfully suggest that the word ‘minor’ as a qualification of ‘misunderstandings’ be eliminated,” Harriman wrote Roosevelt. “I must confess that the misunderstanding appeared to me of major character and the use of the word ‘minor’ might well be misinterpreted here.”
Harriman’s cable had arrived in Roosevelt’s hands with a suggested reply written by White House chief of staff Admiral Leahy, which was normal procedure. Leahy had grown adept at speaking for the president, after years of close service and friendship. His suggested reply read: “I do not wish to delete the word ‘minor’ as it is my desire to consider the misunderstanding a minor matter.” Roosevelt wrote the word “Approved” on the suggested reply to Stalin and handed the cable off to be sent.
At around twelve thirty a portrait artist appeared at the cottage’s front door. Elizabeth Shoumatoff, a tall fifty-six-year-old Ukraine-born artist with striking brown eyes and hair, had been invited to paint FDR. The president moved himself from his wheelchair to a high-backed leather chair for the sake of the portrait. Shoumatoff set up her easel. As she began to sketch, she engaged the president in light conversation, so she could study the contours of his moving face. Some servants were setting a nearby table for the president’s lunch service. Roosevelt turned to Shoumatoff and said (as she recalled), “Now we’ve got just about fifteen more minutes to work,” after which the artist would be asked to leave.
Roosevelt’s eyes remained focused on his paperwork. In the chair next to him, his cousin Daisy Suckley was crocheting. His other cousin Laura Delano was filling vases with flowers. The portrait artist observed the president closely: “He was so absorbed in the material before him that I didn’t dare ask him to look up.” FDR slipped a cigarette into his cigarette holder and lit it, then he lifted his left hand to his temple and began rubbing his forehead. He uttered a sentence so quietly, no one but Miss Suckley heard it, not even the artist Shoumatoff, sitting about six feet away.
“I have a terrific
headache,” he said.
Then he lost consciousness, his head tipping lifelessly forward. Panicked, Suckley turned to Shoumatoff: “Ask the Secret Service man to call a doctor immediately.”
3
OUTSIDE ROOSEVELT’S LITTLE WHITE HOUSE, secret service agents spotted the car of Dr. Howard Bruenn, the president’s physician on call at Warm Springs, as it skidded to a stop at the front door. Dr. Bruenn rushed into the cottage and found Roosevelt unconscious in his bedroom (his butler and valet had moved him). The president’s maids, secretaries, and cousins were all in the house. “It was a stricken and tense little crowd,” remembered the head of the secret service detail, Mike Reilly. Bruenn began quick observations.
Pulse: 104. The president’s blood pressure measured over the indicator’s limit of 300. His left eye appeared widely dilated. Bruenn made an immediate diagnosis: cerebral hemorrhage. He injected the president with nitroglycerin. Then he called Washington.
FDR’s chief physician, Admiral Ross McIntire, took the call in Washington at 3:05 p.m. (2:05 in Warm Springs).* For months McIntire had been giving the president routine examinations, and White House staffers had grown accustomed to seeing medical equipment in the hallway outside Roosevelt’s bedroom in the morning. McIntire was not altogether surprised by this phone call. “Dr. Bruenn told me it was a very serious thing—undoubtedly a cerebral hemorrhage,” McIntire recalled. He made an immediate call to a prominent heart specialist in Atlanta, Dr. James Paullin, and urged him to speed to Roosevelt’s cottage. McIntire’s next call was to Stephen Early, Roosevelt’s longtime secretary and personal confidant. They discussed in grim tones how to handle the situation, and agreed that they needed to find the First Lady at once. They were able to determine that Eleanor Roosevelt was at the Sulgrave Club in Dupont Circle, less than a mile north of the White House, delivering a speech. They declined to contact her at that moment, waiting to see what would happen.
In Warm Springs, secret service agents began patrolling the roads, knowing that the heart specialist Dr. Paullin would be driving in at furious speeds from Atlanta, violating the wartime speed limit of 35 miles per hour. The agents did not want local police interfering with the physician’s quick arrival. When Paullin made it to the Little White House, he found the situation critical.
“The President was in extremis when I reached him,” Paullin’s report read. “He was in a cold sweat, ash gray, and breathing with difficulty . . . On examination his pulse was barely perceptible.”
At three thirty Warm Springs time, Dr. Bruenn called Admiral McIntire in Washington again. “Dr. Bruenn told me things were about the same,” McIntire recalled. “Then he asked me to hold the phone as he was called away.” McIntire could hear loud voices through the phone line, then there was silence. In that same moment, at the cottage in Warm Springs, Paullin and Bruenn were standing over the president’s body. Roosevelt was pronounced dead at 3:35 p.m. (4:35 in Washington).
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In the White House the president’s longtime secretary Stephen Early and Admiral McIntire had decisions to make. It was a moment of strange despair, for so much had to be done, and it all had to be handled very carefully. There was no time for personal grief.
Early called Mrs. Roosevelt at the Sulgrave Club. “[I] asked her to come to the White House as soon as she possibly could,” he recalled. As she herself remembered: “I got into the car and sat with clenched hands all the way to the White House. In my heart of hearts, I knew what had happened.” Early brought the First Lady to her sitting room on the second floor and informed her of her husband’s death. As he would recall, her reaction was to say: “I am more sorry for the people of this country and the world than I am for us.”
Early then had to find the vice president—and quickly.
At the moment of Roosevelt’s death, Truman was presiding over the Senate. Twenty-two minutes after, at 4:57 p.m., the Senate adjourned. Truman headed for what he called his “gold-plated office”—his second office, the traditional office of the vice president (which he rarely used), near the Senate Chamber in the Capitol. When he arrived a phone call was waiting for him from Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House.
“Sam wanted me to come over to the House side of the Capitol and talk to him about policy and procedure,” Truman later wrote. In other words, they were to have a drink together. Truman sent word to his main office in the Senate building, and also to his buddy Eddie McKim at the Statler Hotel, explaining where he would be. By that time McKim had a suite all set for the night’s poker game.
In the Capitol, Truman headed through the long hallways, past the eight-foot statue of Benjamin Franklin, and down a marble staircase to Rayburn’s office, which was affectionately nicknamed “the Board of Education.” Truman arrived at about 5:05 p.m. There the Speaker of the House, “Mr. Sam,” was chatting with a couple of other guests. Here in this office, congressmen gathered to “strike a blow for liberty”—to drink whiskey. When asked why the room was called the Board of Education, Rayburn liked to say: “I guess some fellahs have been educated down there.”
Rayburn handed Truman his drink of choice—bourbon and water—then told him that a call had just come in for him, from Steve Early in the White House. Truman picked up the phone and dialed.
“This is the VP,” he said.
In a strained voice, Early ordered Truman to come to the White House “as quickly and quietly” as possible, and to use the main Pennsylvania Avenue entrance. Rayburn was watching Truman at this moment. “He is kind of a pale fellow . . . and he got a little paler,” Rayburn recalled.
Truman hung up. “Jesus Christ and General Jackson!” he said. He turned to Sam Rayburn. “Steve Early wants me at the White House immediately,” he said. He made for the door, and with his hand on the knob, he turned and said, “Boys, this is in this room. Something must have happened.”
The vice president walked out the door, then broke into a run. The Capitol hallways were nearly empty by this time, and Truman’s footsteps on the marble floor echoed through the corridors. He made it to his office in the Senate building quickly and out of breath. He grabbed his hat. “[I] told my office force that I’d been summoned to the White House and to say nothing about it,” he later wrote.
Outside it had begun to rain again. Truman found his chauffeur, Tom Harty, and off they went in the Mercury state car with no secret service detail. They arrived at the White House “in almost nothing flat,” Truman recalled, motoring through the Northwest Gate. Ushers greeted the vice president at the door, bowing and taking his hat. They led him upstairs via an elevator to the First Lady’s private study, where Truman found Mrs. Roosevelt, her daughter and son-in-law Anna and John Boettiger, and Stephen Early, sitting quietly. The First Lady approached Truman and put her arm around his shoulder.
“Harry,” she said, “the president is dead.”
Four words raced through Truman’s mind: The lightning has struck! “I was fighting off tears,” he later recalled. “It was the only time in my life I think that I ever felt like I’d had a real shock. I had hurried to the White House to see the president and when I arrived I found I was the president. No one in the history of our country ever had it happen to him just that way.”
He gathered himself. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked the First Lady.
“Is there anything we can do for you,” Eleanor Roosevelt answered. “For you are the one in trouble now.”
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From Warm Springs, news of Roosevelt’s death began to spread in whispers and hurried phone calls. Chief secret service agent Mike Reilly dialed his underling James Rowley, who had been casing the location where the president was to attend the barbecue that afternoon in the village.
“I want to see you,” Reilly said. “Come over to the cottage.” Rowley pulled up in his car minutes later. “Come on, walk up the path with me,” Reilly said. They started away from the cottage. “Don’t say anything, but the president is gone.”
“What do you
mean, gone?” Rowley said.
“He’s dead.”
“What?”
At the picnic area in town, Georgia fiddlers and newspaper reporters had arrived, and so had everyone else who was supposed to attend the president’s barbecue—except the president himself. Smelling a story, some reporters jumped into a car and made for the Little White House. “During the drive, none of us said a word because we were all thinking,” recalled White House correspondent Robert Nixon. “Oddly enough the possibility of Roosevelt having died came right to my mind.”
When the reporters arrived, they saw Grace Tully, the president’s personal secretary, sitting on the porch crying. They entered the cottage, where they found correspondence secretary Bill Hassett standing in the living room by the fireplace. A moment of awkwardness passed, after which Hassett said in simple, sober words: “It is my sad duty to tell you that the president has had a stroke and is dead.”
At the White House, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius—“Brother Ed,” as many in Washington called him—was the first cabinet officer to arrive. He had been in a meeting in the State Department building across the street when he received a phone call at 5:10 p.m. from Steve Early, telling him to come immediately, without being noticed. It was “an order,” Early had told him. An usher brought Stettinius to Mrs. Roose-velt’s second-floor study, where she sat with Truman and Early. Stettinius had stark ivory-white hair and glaring black eyebrows, his face oddly reminiscent of piano keys. When the First Lady delivered the news to him, he was stunned. Conversation turned to procedure. What was to be done? “Everything was completely disorganized and nobody knew exactly where to turn,” Stettinius recalled.
He advised that the rest of the president’s cabinet be called to the White House at once. Truman agreed. Truman also wanted Secretary of the Senate Les Biffle, Senate majority leader Alben Barkley, minority leader Wallace White, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Attorney General Francis Biddle, and a handful of others. He asked if Stettinius would make the arrangements, and the secretary of state quickly delegated the orders. The time was set for a cabinet meeting—6:15 p.m., in less than an hour.