The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  A few weeks later he traveled to Quebec to attend the eighth meeting of Allied leaders since Pearl Harbor. In three crowded days, Roosevelt pledged to provide Britain with economic aid after the war, agreed to use British warships in the Pacific, and to continue to work secretly together with Britain to build an atomic weapon.

  After a final formal dinner on the evening of September 15, Roosevelt, Churchill, the Canadian prime minister, and their aides watched Wilson, a romanticized life of the president under whom FDR had served during the Great War. Toward the end, the exhausted on-screen president refuses to give up his struggle for the League of Nations and suffers a massive stroke that leaves him helpless.

  FDR had witnessed that helplessness firsthand, and as he watched the film, he was heard muttering to himself, “By God, that’s not going to happen to me.” Afterward, Bruenn took the president’s blood pressure: it was 240 over 130—dangerously high, the highest his doctors had yet recorded.

  Anna Roosevelt Boettiger peers anxiously around the turret at her father as he struggles through his speech on the deck of the USS Cummings at Bremerton, Washington. Afterward, Sam Rosenman remembered, Anna “secretly expressed to me her apprehension about whether her father would still have enough of his old campaign fire to meet the young and forceful [Republican presidential nominee, New York governor Thomas E.] Dewey.”

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  Churchill and Roosevelt meet again in Quebec, September 11, 1944. The prime minister was so shocked at the president’s appearance that he took Admiral McIntire aside to express his concern. McIntire said there was nothing to worry about. “With all my heart I hope so,” Churchill said. “We cannot have anything happen to that man.”

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  The Tired Old Man

  As the 1944 presidential campaign drew near, questions about Roosevelt and his health were being raised everywhere. “Let’s not be squeamish,” said an editorial in the New York Sun, “six presidents have died in office.”

  FDR’s poorly delivered radio address at Bremerton had alarmed many of his supporters. If he were to win again, he had to convince the country he was still up to the job. In late September, he spoke over the radio at a convivial Teamster’s dinner in a Washington hotel. A Republican congressman had made an absurd charge on the House floor that during the president’s recent visit to Alaska, he had left Fala behind and wasted taxpayer dollars and risked sailors’ lives by sending a destroyer back to pick him up.

  The president made the most of it, stopping again and again to let the raucous laughter die down. Millions listening at home laughed, too.

  These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or on my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family don’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, you know Fala’s Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I’d left him behind on an Aleutian Island and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.

  Roosevelt launched his formal campaign with a New York motorcade on October 21. A cold steady rain lashed the city. Admiral McIntire urged FDR to close the roof of his green presidential Packard, but he refused: he wanted New Yorkers—and voters beyond New York—to see that he was still his old fighting self.

  The president covered fifty-one miles through four of the city’s five boroughs. Somewhere between one and a half and three million people turned out in the rain to see him pass by, smiling and waving as if it were the sunniest of days. At one point his car was stopped so that he could be carried inside to have his soaking-wet clothes changed by aides and Secret Servicemen—and to down a stiff shot of bourbon.

  The tour of the city took more than four hours. That evening, Roosevelt somehow summoned his remaining strength and delivered a major address to the Foreign Policy Association. In it, he urged that the new United Nations—unlike the old League of Nations—be empowered to act “quickly and decisively to keep the peace, by force if necessary.”

  The audience, FDR told Daisy, was “80% Republican & [he] was quite prepared to have [an] … unresponsive audience & was equally determined to make them responsive!” He succeeded. They gave him a standing ovation.

  As election day drew near, good news was coming in from battlefields all around the world. The navy destroyed most of what remained of the Japanese fleet at Leyte Gulf. General Douglas MacArthur waded ashore in the Philippines. American troops had ventured onto German soil for the first time and taken the fortified city of Aachen.

  Roosevelt took no chances. He campaigned through seven states and spoke at Wilmington and Philadelphia, Fort Wayne and Chicago, Clarksburg, West Virginia, Bridgeport, Hartford, Springfield, Kingston, and Poughkeepsie before returning to Hyde Park to vote and wait for the returns.

  He won—though it was the closest of the four presidential races he’d run.

  Daisy Suckley was exultant.

  FDR for the fourth time.… It has become trite to say he is an amazing man with an amazing career—and what more does the future hold for him! …

  The “tired old man” put one over on Dewey [this] time! … The night was like the other election nights with the President and a handful of helpers … bringing the tickers. …

  Only one real interruption when the [Hyde Park] torch parade had to be spoken to from the terrace. It was chilly out there, but FDR … with cape open, seemed unconscious of it. The rest of us hugged our coats about us.

  A little over a month later, on December 16, under a thick cloud of winter mist, three Nazi Panzer divisions began a massive surprise attack on the Allied lines in Belgium, in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. For a week it seemed possible they might split U.S. forces from their British comrades, a final gamble by Hitler and his generals.

  As always, Roosevelt remained calm when receiving bad news. “In great stress,” General Marshall remembered, “Roosevelt was a strong man.” He followed the fighting in his map room, but he did not try to second-guess his commanders.

  Then, on December 23, the weather cleared. American planes began bombarding the enemy, and things started to turn. It was the costliest battle in western Europe. There were ninety thousand American casualties, but the Allies would retake the ground they’d lost and prepare to move into Germany.

  That same day, a relieved president traveled to Hyde Park for Christmas. James, Franklin Jr., and John were all away at war, Eleanor wrote in “My Day,” but she was happy to report that Elliott and FDR’s son-in-law, John Boettiger, were home on leave.

  I am thankful for every glimpse, no matter how short, of any of our own boys, or of the other boys who are friends of ours and drop in for a few days when they get a short time out of the fighting areas. I try to remember always what an old friend of my grandmother’s used to say: “Enjoy every minute you have with those you love, my dear, for no one can take joy that is past away from you. It will be there in your heart to live on when the dark days come.”

  A blunt Republican button from the 1944 campaign, and FDR’s forty-two-year-old Republican opponent, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York. Shown here at his Albany desk, Dewey struck many, even among his supporters, as stiff and pompous. Alice Roosevelt Longworth once compared him to “the little man on the wedding cake.” But he was also young and vigorous—in vivid contrast, he said, to the “old, tired and quarrelsome men” of the Roosevelt administration.

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  FDR at the Teamster’s dinner at which he used Fala’s supposed indignation to skewer the opposition

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  The political impact of the speech, as assessed by Tom Little in the Nashville Tennessean. “The old master is back again,” Sam Rosenman wrote after the broadcast. “The champ is now out on the road. The o
ld boy has the same old fighting stuff and he cannot be licked.”

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES Roosevelt kicks off his 1944 campaign by driving through the New York City streets in the rain, with Fala at his side.

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  The “lucky” campaign hat FDR wore during all four presidential campaigns. Having won a third term in 1940, Roosevelt agreed to let the Motion Picture Relief Fund auction it off for charity. Two Hollywood admirers, Edward G. Robinson and Melvyn Douglas, bought it for $3,000—and then returned it in time for the fourth campaign.

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  On election night, FDR greets his Hyde Park neighbors at Springwood. As Anna and her mother look on, the Democratic town supervisor, Elmer van Wagner Sr., a longtime political ally, introduces his son and namesake to the president.

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  American infantrymen inch their way through a snow-filled forest during the Battle of the Bulge, which seemed for a time to have halted the Allied march toward victory in western Europe.

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  The Roosevelts’ Christmas card for 1944

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  The family gathered for a holiday portrait at the White House a few days before traveling to Hyde Park for Christmas Day. Eleanor holds Fala. The smiling women behind the president are Ethel du Pont Roosevelt, wife of the absent Franklin Jr., and Anna Eleanor—“Sistie”—Anna’s daughter by her first husband, Curtis Dall. Elliott Roosevelt is at the right with his third wife, the actress Faye Emerson.

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  The Trend of Civilization … Is Forever Upward

  For FDR’s fourth inaugural on January 20, 1945, there was no traditional ceremony at the Capitol, no procession. With the world at war, “Who is there to parade?” the president had asked. But he had insisted that all thirteen of his grandchildren attend. He wanted the family together, Eleanor remembered, “realizing full well this would certainly be his last inauguration, perhaps even having a premonition that he would not be with us very long.”

  Daisy Suckley was among the guests invited to join the president for the swearing-in on the South Porch of the White House. “The signal came,” she wrote, “and the President moved out to the porch behind the Chief Justice and the two vice presidents, old and new.… Two men lifted him out of his chair to an upright position. He held on to the handles on the desk with both hands. During the first part of the speech it looked as though his right arm was straining a good deal, it was trembling.”

  FDR had not attempted to stand in public for months. His inaugural address was the shortest since George Washington’s—less than five minutes. But his message was pure Roosevelt.

  We shall strive for perfection. We shall not achieve it immediately—but we still shall strive. We may make mistakes—but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principle.

  I remember that my old schoolmaster, Dr. Peabody, said—in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled, he said, “Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.”

  “It did us all good to see him standing there,” Daisy wrote, “straight and vigorous, thin but with good color. All the sentimental ladies who love him,” she added, “were ready for tears!”

  Mrs. Woodrow Wilson was moved to tears, too. “I feel terrible,” she told Frances Perkins. “I feel dreadful. Oh, it frightened me. He looks exactly as my husband did when he went into his decline. Don’t say that to another human soul.”

  Just two days later, Roosevelt began a seven-thousand-mile journey to Yalta on the Black Sea, where he was to meet for a second time with Churchill and Stalin.

  After being sworn in as president for the fourth time, FDR speaks to a small gathering on the White House lawn; and shakes hands with his new vice president, Harry Truman. “Dog catchers have taken office with more pomp and ceremony,” FDR’s Secret Service chief Mike Reilly remembered.

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  In these three greatly magnified frames from a newsreel, filmed at the end of the president’s brief remarks, Roosevelt, who is no longer strong enough even to simulate walking, is seen throwing his arms around the shoulders of an aide and his son James so that they can lift him away from the podium.

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  I Know That You Will Pardon Me

  The journey to Yalta was arduous—eight days at sea, a twelve-hundred-mile flight to a tiny airfield at Saki in the Crimea, and a six-hour drive by car over badly rutted roads to the crumbling czarist Livadia Palace, where Stalin had insisted the meeting was to be held. “If we had spent ten years on research,” Harry Hopkins told his boss, “we could not have picked a worse place.”

  Eleanor had hoped to attend, but FDR had taken Anna with him instead. She tried her best to keep her father from too much exertion. “I have found out through [Dr.] Bruenn (who won’t let me tell Ross [McIntire] that I know) that this ‘ticker’ situation is more serious than I ever knew,” Anna wrote to her husband. “And the biggest difficulty … is that we can, of course, tell no one.… It’s truly worrisome—and there’s not a helluva lot anyone can do about it.”

  Churchill was alarmed at Roosevelt’s condition, too. “I noticed that the president was ailing,” he recalled. “His captivating smile, his gay and charming manner had not deserted him, but his face had a transparency, an air of purification, and often there was a faraway look in his eyes.”

  Charles Bohlen, who served as Roosevelt’s interpreter and attended every meeting, agreed that Roosevelt had sometimes been “lethargic, but when important moments arose, he was mentally sharp.”

  The talks went on for a week. The stakes could not have been higher.

  The war in Europe was nearing its bloody climax, but some of Roosevelt’s commanders believed it would take another eighteen months and countless American lives before Japan could be bludgeoned into surrendering. Iwo Jima and Okinawa still had to be taken before a costly all-out invasion of the Japanese mainland could be organized, and no one could be sure the mysterious weapon being developed by the Manhattan Project would ever work. To hasten victory and save American lives, Roosevelt insisted that the Soviets make good on their pledge to enter the Pacific war after the Germans surrendered. When Stalin agreed, Admiral Ernest J. King exulted, “We’ve just saved two million Americans!”

  Stalin was triumphant. His armies had overrun Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and East Prussia and were closing in on Berlin itself. American-made “machines” may have made those victories possible, as he had said in Tehran, but it had been Soviet citizens—somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-eight million of them, two-thirds of whom were civilians—who had paid for them with their lives. Now, Stalin saw no reason to let go of the territory his armies had taken from the Germans at such a fearful cost. “This war is not as in the past,” he once explained; “whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system … as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”

  The Americans and British had neither the resolve nor the capability to change his mind. And when the Soviet dictator made a vague promise of “free and unfettered elections” in Poland—the unfortunate country whose invasion by Germany had launched the war—Roosevelt and Churchill had little choice but to accept it at face value.

  Stalin agreed to join a postwar United Nations, too, but only if the Soviet Union had a veto as a member of the Security Council and was awarded two extra votes in the General Assembly for the so-called independent “republics” of Ukraine and White Russia.

  The Yalta agreements were not all that he had hoped, FDR told an aide, but they were the best he could do. More meetings would be needed to achieve the kind of peace the world wanted
.

  He was weak and weary when he returned from Yalta—so weak and so weary that when he reported on his trip to a joint session of Congress on March 1, he allowed himself to be wheeled into the House chamber, transferred himself to a chair behind a bank of microphones, and then, for the first time in his career, made public reference to the braces without which he could not stand.

  I hope that you will pardon me for an unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say, but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.

  Legislators on both sides of the aisle broke into sustained applause. “I remember choking up,” Frances Perkins said, “to realize that he was actually saying, ‘You see, I’m a crippled man.’ … He had to bring himself to full humility to say it before Congress.”

  His report, interrupted by sometimes clumsy ad-libbed asides that alarmed some of those closest to him, was characteristically hopeful for the future.

  The Crimea Conference … ought to spell the end of a system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries. We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a chance to join.