As Stephens continued to work on the cast’s makeup, Graham Jackson appeared and came running across the stage, tears streaming down his face.
“Mrs. Stephens,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “he’s dead, the President is dead. It’s on the radio!”40
In disbelief, Mrs. Stephens went to the nearest radio to get confirmation; having done so, she then faced the task of making the announcement to the large audience of patients and staff before her. What made this doubly hard was the thought of all the children, whom she had specifically invited to this special performance, waiting anxiously in their wheelchairs to greet the man whom most Americans referred to as president of the United States, but whom they personally thought of as a special friend, and one of them.
Graham Jackson playing Dvorak’s “Going Home,” with patients saying good-bye for the last time, Warm Springs, April 13, 1945. (Edward Clark, TIME/LIFE)
Remembering that there was a Methodist minister, Reverend Benjamin Mize, in the audience, Stephens quietly summoned him backstage. Then she gathered the cast to give them the news and, after asking the minister if he would lead a prayer, mustered all of the courage she had and walked out to center stage.
“It is with a great deal of sympathy and regret on the part of the cast and the entire Foundation family, that I make the announcement,” she said, her voice quaking, “that the President of the United States is dead. He died at 3:35 this afternoon. If you will all stand we will have a minute of silent prayer, which the Reverend Mize will close.”41
The audience, most of whom already had tears in their eyes, brought their hands together to pray. Those who could, stood up on their braces, or leaned on canes, but many more, confined as they were to wheelchairs, simply bowed their heads.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS STILL AT THE EVENT AT THE SULGRAVE Club when she was called to the telephone. Stephen Early found it difficult on this occasion to hide his emotions as he requested that the First Lady return to the White House immediately. Eleanor did not ask why, but given Early’s tone and the unexpected call, she suspected something dreadful had happened.
Eleanor went back to the benefit to say her good-byes and express her regret that she could not stay any longer, “because something had come up at home” that made it impossible for her to remain.42 As the car took her back to the White House, she sat silently with clenched fists. Later on, she remembered that she knew in her heart what had happened, but as she wrote, “One does not actually formulate these terrible thoughts until they are spoken.” Upon arrival, she went into her sitting room and waited. Stephen Early and Dr. McIntire came in to tell her “the President had slipped away.” They gave her details, including Bruenn’s initial report of a hemorrhage.43
It was widely reported in the press at the time that Eleanor’s first words were “I am more sorry for the people of this country and of the world than I am for ourselves.” Eleanor later admitted that she could not recall making this statement, and in fact doubted that she had. Most likely it came from the savvy press wrangler Early. But even if Eleanor had not said those words, the sentiment they expressed were certainly consistent with her thoughts—and with the actions she took after her husband’s death.
Her first step was to send at once for Vice President Truman. She then composed a somber, straightforward message for her four sons, who were scattered all over the world by the demands of war.
DARLINGS, PA SLIPPED AWAY THIS AFTERNOON. HE DID HIS JOB TO THE END, AS HE WOULD WANT YOU TO DO. BLESS YOU. ALL OUR LOVE. MOTHER44
VICE PRESIDENT TRUMAN HAD SPENT THE AFTERNOON PRESIDING over the institution he loved above all others, the US Senate. With the day’s official business through, he headed for the private hideaway that House Speaker Sam Rayburn ran on the ground floor of the Capitol, where it was Truman’s custom to enjoy a “libation” and talk business or simply relax with those members who had achieved a certain status in Rayburn’s eyes.
Just after 5:00 p.m. Eastern War Time (4:00 p.m. in Warm Springs) Truman entered “room number 9,” where he greeted the man who was now second in line for the presidency.
“Steve Early wants you to call him right away,” Rayburn said, mentioning that he had just heard from the White House.
Truman mixed himself a drink and then dialed the White House line.
“This is the V.P.,” he said.
“Please come to the White House as quickly and quietly as you can,” Early said, in a voice that Truman thought sounded strange, “and make sure you enter through the main entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“Jesus Christ and General Jackson,” said an alarmed Truman as he put down the phone.
“They want me at the White House right away,” he told Rayburn and the two other guests in the room, but “you are to say nothing about it.”45
It took ten minutes for the vice president’s car to reach the White House. “I thought I was going down there to meet the President,” Truman later explained, imagining that perhaps FDR had returned early from Warm Springs. Two ushers met Truman at the door. The vice president was escorted to Mrs. Roosevelt’s private quarters on the second floor. Waiting there with her were Anna and her husband, along with Early. As soon as Truman entered the room, Eleanor Roosevelt rose, put her hand gently on his shoulder, and said,
“Harry, the President is dead.”
Truman stared at her for a moment, then said gravely, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
To which Eleanor replied, in a remark that became famous,
“Is there anything we can do for you, for you are the one in trouble now.”46
NINE THOUSAND MILES AWAY, JAMES ROOSEVELT SAT ALONE IN HIS room at Marine Headquarters in Manila, staring at the message he had just been handed from his mother. Rereading the cable, he thought about how the burden of World War II had weighed on his father, much like the Civil War had aged Abraham Lincoln and World War I had laid low Woodrow Wilson. It seemed to him that his father was just as much a victim of the war as any soldier killed in battle.
Reflecting on the time he had spent with his father, James was especially grateful for the years he spent working in the White House just before the war. He was seized by a strong desire to see his father one more time. He thought about the brief hours they had shared at the last inauguration, their discussion of his father’s will, and his desire to have all thirteen grandchildren present at the ceremony, which all seemed to make sense now in retrospect. He had always deeply admired his father, but felt that he did not realize until this moment how much he loved him.47
James’s commanding officer, Admiral Ralph Davis, asked if there was anything he could do, and when James expressed his wish to fly back to Washington for the funeral, the admiral said he would see what could be arranged. Within hours James was on a plane, for the first leg of what would turn out to be a grueling sixty-hour trip back to New York. He arrived an hour and a half too late to join the burial services.48
WHEN LUCY AND MADAME SHOUMATOFF REACHED MACON, GEORGIA, they stopped at one of the city’s major hotels to use the phone, in the hopes of learning about FDR’s condition. After Lucy had tried in vain to get through the jammed lines a number of times, Madame Shoumatoff suggested she go upstairs to the main switchboard of the hotel to ask one of the operators to make a special call for them.
When Madame Shoumatoff reached the telephone office, however, she found the two operators weeping and exclaiming “the President is dead!” Even though Madame Shoumatoff had just come from the president’s side, the statement jolted her. For a moment she stood staring at the two women. Then she went downstairs to tell Lucy, who, having heard the news from passersby, sat motionless in the lobby. She remained unable to speak as they returned to the car for the long drive back to their homes in Aiken, South Carolina.49
THE VICE PRESIDENT REMAINED WITH ELEANOR IN HER SITTING ROOM while Stephen Early returned to his office to place the official White House call to the wire services—an act he had already coordinated with Hassett in War
m Springs and which seemed eerily reminiscent of the call he made four years ago about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. By this point he had also asked Hassett and Dr. Bruenn to select a casket for the president that was in keeping with the First Lady’s wishes, and to work with Admiral Leahy and others on making the arrangements to return the president’s body to Washington the next day.50
At 6:00 p.m. Eastern War Time, Early and Dr. McIntire held a joint press conference. Still unwilling or unable to acknowledge the precariousness of the president’s health in the previous months, McIntire insisted that right up to the end FDR was in reasonable shape for a man of his age and that the hemorrhage “came out of the clear sky.”51
It was 7:00 p.m. by the time a distraught Secretary Stettinius had managed to summon the cabinet together for a solemn swearing-in ceremony in the Cabinet Room. All of the members were present, with the exception of Frank Walker, who was ill. Eleanor had also decided to stay away, so the only women present were the vice president’s wife and daughter and Frances Perkins.
After receiving the oath at 7:09 p.m., Truman convened a brief cabinet meeting, and as he rose to speak, Perkins thought he looked frightened at the challenges he now faced. Truman stated that he did not feel worthy or strong enough to carry this load, but “with the help of God, he would do it, and would do it as well as he could.”52
A few minutes later, Eleanor, McIntire, and Early left for their flight to Columbus, Georgia, about thirty-five miles southwest of War Springs. As Eleanor, “tall and erect” and dressed in black, made her way to the waiting White House limousine, one newspaper reporter could not help but notice her composure, quietly remarking that she was “a trouper to the last.”53
ELEANOR MAINTAINED THE SAME DEMEANOR WHEN SHE ARRIVED IN Warm Springs about 11:00 p.m. that evening. Entering the Little White House, she embraced Daisy, Polly, and Grace Tully. Grace immediately remarked how deeply sorry she was for Eleanor and the children. “Tully, dear,” Eleanor replied, “I am so very sorry for all of you.”54 Then Eleanor sat down on the sofa and asked Daisy and Polly to tell her exactly what happened. After they had spoken to her for some time, she turned to Grace and asked if she too had been present, which led Grace to recount her own experiences that day, including that she had been in the house when FDR died.
At this point, Polly, perhaps convinced that Eleanor was bound to find out one way or another, or perhaps free to give sway to a long-suspected antipathy for Eleanor now that FDR was gone, revealed that Lucy Rutherfurd and Madame Shoumatoff had been in Warm Springs for the past three days.55 Somehow, Eleanor managed to maintain her self-control when she learned that the woman her husband had promised never to see again was with him just moments before he died. After asking a few penetrating questions about the nature of their meetings, and who arranged them, Eleanor walked into FDR’s bedroom and closed the door.
Eleanor never revealed what she thought or felt in the five minutes or so that she remained alone with her husband, but when she reemerged, as Grace Tully observed, “her eyes were dry, her face grave but composed.”56 Then the First Lady sent them all off to bed.
Heading to the guest cottage, Daisy reflected that Eleanor loved FDR “more than she knows herself, and his feeling for her was deep and lasting. The fact that they could not relax together… is the tragedy of their joint lives.”57
Over time, Eleanor Roosevelt would come to appreciate what Daisy saw all too well—to recognize, as she later wrote, that men and women who live together for decades not only get to know each other’s failings “but also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.”58 Eleanor also understood, as she finally retired for the night, that though her husband’s passing was a terrible blow, it was impossible to think of it solely in terms of a personal tragedy.
All through that evening, in small towns, hamlets, along railway sidings, and in front of the White House, Americans gathered to express their grief and uncertainty about the future. As James Roosevelt later recalled, “Our lives had gone down one road for so long that we knew no other way. Now our lives would be altered to follow another course.” His father, he realized, had been the glue that held his disparate family together, but James might just as well have been speaking about the wartime alliance and the “family of nations” that FDR had so ardently hoped would set the world on the path to peace.59
AS DAWN BROKE ON APRIL 12, 1945, IT SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE generation who had lived through the two most profound crises of the twentieth century to imagine a world without Franklin Roosevelt. But the leader who had launched a new era with a hundred days of frenetic action in 1933—when, as he put it, “this nation was asking for action and action now”—was no more. It would now be up to others to don his mantle and carry his causes forward—to finish the work he had started twelve long years before, when a paralyzed nation and a troubled world looked to a man who could not stand without the help of others to lift a suffering humanity toward the promise of a new day.
Epilogue
Looking Beyond Victory
IT WAS A BRIGHT SUNDAY MORNING WHEN THE PRESIDENTIAL TRAIN carrying Franklin D. Roosevelt made its way up the Hudson River Valley for the last time. Waiting patiently at the special railway siding adjacent to the river at Springwood stood a contingent of soldiers, sailors, and airmen. It would soon be their task to lift the president’s flag-draped coffin onto a caisson, which a team of six US Army horses would then pull up the narrow farm road to the burial site at the crest of the ridge high above. The tulip poplar and oak that FDR had planted years ago had not yet broken out in leaves, and in the deep recesses of the woods, one could still see patches of snow on the ground, but the abundance of skunk cabbage shooting up from the soil was a sure sign that spring had arrived. Inside the rectangular Rose Garden, surrounded by the century-old hemlock hedge that FDR had wanted to see replanted that spring, an enormous bank of flowers lay next to the open grave, which had been prepared by William Plog, the faithful superintendent of the Roosevelt estate who had been hired by FDR’s father nearly fifty years before. By the time the president’s train arrived at just before 9:00 a.m., nearly two hundred dignitaries, high officials, members of Congress, and senior military officers had already gathered, speaking in hushed tones as they lingered about the gravesite. Accompanying the casket as it made its way northward from Washington were Eleanor, Anna and Elliott and their spouses, and other members of the Roosevelt family. President and Mrs. Truman were also on board, along with their daughter Margaret, as well as all nine justices of the Supreme Court and virtually the entire Roosevelt cabinet, including Frances Perkins and Henry Wallace, both of whom understood that the cord that had bound the cabinet together “had snapped.”1
FDR being laid to rest in the center of the Rose Garden, in the presence of Eleanor, Anna, and other members of the Roosevelt family, Hyde Park, New York, April 15, 1945. (Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)
At 10:00 a.m. the first loud crack of a twenty-one gun salute echoed through the valley to mark the official start of the interment service, followed by the sound of muffled drums and the slow cadence of Chopin’s funeral dirge played by the West Point Army Band, who marched ahead of the president’s coffin as it was slowly brought up from the river. Once the procession had reached the entrance to the garden, it halted, and six noncommissioned officers carried the bronze and mahogany casket bearing the president’s body to his final resting place, not more than 250 yards from the small second-floor bedroom of the home where he was born.
Left unsaid that morning was how the world was going to cope with the loss of Franklin Roosevelt. Indeed, the only precedent for the outpouring of grief occasioned by his sudden passing was the reaction to the death of Abraham Lincoln eighty years before. Millions of Americans felt a profound sense of uncertainty about the future. To many, especially those in uniform, it seemed as if they had lost their own father. Nor were these sentiments confined to the United States.
In London, more than two thousand people thronged St. Paul’s Cathedral for a memorial service called in honor of the late president, while several hundreds more, many of them weeping, gathered outside to listen to the service on loudspeakers. In Moscow, FDR was honored with front-page coverage in the official Soviet press, memorial broadcasts, and black-bordered flags flying above the Kremlin. Many ordinary Russians expressed their sorrow openly, wiping away tears as they spoke of their own personal sense of loss at the American president’s demise.2
A forlorn-looking Winston Churchill leaving St. Paul’s Cathedral with his daughter Sarah, following the memorial service for Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 17, 1945. (Getty Images)
By all accounts, both Churchill and Stalin, even though they had noticed the decline in the president’s health at Yalta, were stunned by the news. Near midnight on April 12, 1945, Churchill, working late as usual, had just finished writing out a telegram to Clementine, who was in Leningrad on an official tour for the Red Cross, when he learned that FDR had died. Quickly adding a line saying that he had just received the “grievous news of President Roosevelt’s death,” he appeared distressed and distracted as he handed the telegram to his assistants. “I am much weakened in every way by his loss,” he commented some moments later, before writing out a personal note of condolence to both Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, as well as a letter forwarding the news to King George VI, to whom he lamented that “ties have been shorn asunder which years had woven.”3
The same alarm and incredulity was evident at the Kremlin some hours later, when Ambassador Harriman called on Marshal Stalin to offer his personal reassurance about the continuation of American foreign policy in the wake of the president’s death. Stalin greeted the ambassador in silence, and stood holding Harriman’s hand without saying a word for perhaps thirty seconds before he asked him to sit down. Like Churchill, Stalin appeared distressed as he questioned Harriman closely about the circumstances of FDR’s death. He also insisted, as Harriman recounted the importance of US–Soviet relations, that “President Roosevelt has died but his cause must live on.” Then, in what was perhaps an indication of his sincerity, he agreed to reverse his earlier decision and allow Foreign Minister Molotov to travel to San Francisco to represent the Soviet Union at the United Nations conference.4
The Last 100 Days Page 34