Previously on the Roosevelts FDR championed sweeping new programs Social Security represents a
Redefinition of the American social contract while confiding in a discreet friend
Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt
evidently don't get on together as the shadow of war hung over Europe and
now part six of the Roosevelts and intimate history
In the late summer of 1939 the growing threat of war was not enough to deter President Franklin
Roosevelt's 85 year old mother
Sara Delano Roosevelt from undertaking her annual visit to see her sister Dora in Paris
But when the State Department realized war was about to begin and warned all Americans to leave Europe
She reluctantly agreed to sail for home
Reporters met her on the dock at Marseilles
What do you think of the international situation I
Can only hope?
for peace
But I must say that after seeing that wonderful you yesterday
I fear that France is prepared for anything and
Can only hope and pray that it will be peace?
Will the president run for a third term I
Have never even heard him speak of a third term
He always
Considers that pleasure returning to his home in Hyde Park after the present term is over
In reporting on the state of the nation
Franklin Roosevelt was more than halfway through his second four years as president in the summer of 1939
None of his predecessors had dared defy the precedent set by George, Washington and run for a third term
At first FDR did not expect to do so either
Work had begun on the Presidential Library at Hyde Park
Where he planned to store his papers and write his memoirs, and he had built himself a hilltop cottage nearby?
Where he could get away from visitors and where both his clothes personal secretary Missy lehand
And his devoted distant cousin Daisy Suckley
Separately hoped to live with him
He told another relative. I am a tired and weary man
He loved to go there with Daisy Suckley and just talk and watch the Sun set over the Hudson and enjoy himself
And he would serve tea in the afternoon
Himself they would bring him a toaster, and he would toast the bread for his guests
and then he could hand them the toast and
He thought it was a wonderful gesture, and he loved being able to do it all by himself
No servants involved and they thought it was a wonderful gesture, which made it even more wonderful, and he was himself there
It was not his mother's house is not his wife's house and it was totally accessible
Eleanor Roosevelt was weary, too
There is no end to the appointments teas
social obligations she wrote
That year alone she would entertain
323 overnight guests
oversee dinner for four thousand seven hundred and twenty nine more visitors
preside over tea for over nine thousand and shake hands with another
fourteen thousand all that while dictating a daily column
delivering 45 lectures conducting a weekly radio program and
Trying to focus on the host of social issues that took her all over the country
She did not want four more years of it
She told an old friend and couldn't wait for the day when she could at long last
Take on the job and see it through to a conclusion on her own
If FDR didn't leave the White House in 1941 she had warned her daughter Anna
She would then
Just two days after the president's mother got back to New York everything changed
September 2nd
1939
at 5 o'clock this morning
our telephone at a friend's apartment in New York rang and
It was my husband in Washington to tell me the sad news that Germany had invaded Poland and
that her planes were bombing Polish cities I
Feel no bitterness against the German people I am deeply sorry for them
As I am for the people of all other European nations facing this
horrible crisis
But for Hitler the man who has taken this responsibility on his shoulders
I
Can feel little pity
it is hard to see how he can sleep at night and
Think of the many people in many nations whom he may send to their deaths
When the Great War had broken out in 1914
Woodrow Wilson had called upon all Americans to remain neutral in thought as well as deed
as
the Second World War began
FDR was careful not to make the same request
This nation will remain a neutral nation
But I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well
Even a neutral has a right to take account
Roosevelt and most of his fellow citizens
Sympathized with Hitler's victims and with France and England when they went to war to stop him
But an even bigger majority was opposed to any American involvement overseas
For fear that the Allies would pull the United States into another war
The American suspicion of
British intentions
American reluctance and isolationism to go into yet another foreign war were deep and real
forces that constrained FDR
FDR's leadership from 39 through Pearl Harbor was
You know one step forward and try not to have to take two back, and it was a game of inches
Let no man or woman
Thoughtlessly or falsely talk of sending
American armies to European field
The United States was poorly prepared for conflict
the Army was smaller than that of Romania's
fewer than
174 thousand men in uniform
fitted out with kin hats and leggings issued during the Great War and
carrying rifles designed in 1903
The army still owned tens of thousands of cavalry horses
Even Roosevelt's beloved Navy was only marginally bigger than it had been when he took office
On the day the war in Europe began
General George C, Marshall took the oath as army chief of staff
He was able taciturn and so blunt that after he had vigorously disagreed with the president
His fellow generals assumed his career was over
instead when the time came
FDR reached down past the names of 34 of them to put George Marshall in charge
There's a wonderful upside to massive egotism
And that is a confidence in having the most powerful strong-minded people around you
The question became how far Roosevelt dared go to help the Allies
Three weeks after Hitler invaded Poland
FDR called upon Congress to revise the Neutrality Act and end the embargo on the sale of arms to belligerence
But only by arguing that the stronger the Allies got the less likely it was the United States
Would ever have to go to war
After six bitter weeks of debate Congress did lift the ban
But insisted that arms could only be sold on a cash and carry basis
most of the progressive Midwestern Republicans who had once supported New Deal legislation
Were isolationists opposed to any aid to the Allies
Roosevelt found himself more dependent than ever before on the conservative Southern Democrats
He'd once tried to purge from his party
After the Nazis devastated Poland a shadowy seven-month lull settled over Europe
Senator William Borah an isolationist from Idaho dubbed it the phony war
Then in the spring of 1940 the phoney war became real once again
In April the Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway
on May 10th German bombers filled the skies over Brussels Amsterdam
Rotterdam
And German troops invaded the Netherlands Luxembourg, Belgium and France
The following day Winston Churchill who had worn four years of the Nazi threat to Britain became prime minister
One of the mysteries of history is why is it to certain moments produce exactly the right human beings and
we were
incredibly fortunate
Churchill did something FDR couldn't do
Churchill stood alone
Stared across the channel and said Hitler has gone that far, and he will go no farther
Roosevelt did something that Churchill couldn't do
He shrewdly managed American public opinion
To a moment when the world's greatest democracy was willing to project force to defend its values in a distant land
They couldn't have done what they did without each other, and we wouldn't be who we are without the two of them
By early June the Germans would force three hundred and thirty-eight thousand British and French troops
across the English Channel
Leaving behind at Dunkirk hundreds of thousands of tons of armaments and heavy equipment
The scene has darkened swiftly Churchill told Roosevelt in the first of a series of nearly
2,000 secret wartime messages between the Prime Minister and the president the
Small countries are simply smashed up one by one like matchwood. He said
We expect to be attacked here ourselves
If necessary we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that
But unless the United States would sell Britain several hundred aircraft and lend her 40 to 50 destroyers
He could not promise to hold out for long
Roosevelt had been corresponding quietly with Churchill for almost a year
He had been First Lord of the Admiralty then but Roosevelt have understood. He might well be Prime Minister one day
FDR reached out to him interestingly almost never happened for the head of state of one nation to write a cabinet minister
FDR wrote in his usual way very breezy
Saying if you have anything you would like me to know please send it and I will answer
Stay in touch with me directly
Stay in touch with me directly
Roosevelt and Churchill shared a love of ships they understood naval power and
Churchill recognized that as he put it the new world was going to have to step forth to the rescue and liberation of the old
To him the new world was embodied in Franklin Roosevelt
Roosevelt did all that he felt he could to help
members of the Senate of the House of Representatives these are ominous days
days whose swift and shocking developments
Cause every neutral nation to look to its defenses in the light of new factor
The brutal force of modern
offensive war
Had been losing all its power
The president asked for half a million more men for the army and
Then called for the building of 50,000 warplanes within the next 12 months
Enough planes to outstrip the German air force in a single year and to provide sufficient
additional aircraft for sale to Britain
Critics thought he was delusional
50,000 planes was ten times the country's current capacity
People said it's impossible it can be done
He said the American people like to be challenged to do the impossible then they do the possible
The democracy cannot cope with a new techniques of
government developed in recent years
By a few countries which denies freedom that we maintain are essential to our
democratic way of life that
I
reject
He understood that without political power
without the marshaling of it without the
cultivation of it all the high principles and all the soaring rhetoric in the world wouldn't make any difference
And I would argue that his finest hour
Was the run-up to the second world war because he was leading a nation that?
Would just as soon had thrown him out of office as
Fight the forces of the Third Reich and yet he got got us there
June 20th
1940 Anna
darling
the Republican convention seemed so usual and the times so
Unusual that I find it hard to reconcile the two
France is crushed
What will be Hitler's next move?
South America or the USA and
Will Japan be acting with them in a concerted plan?
It looks that way just now
What a sad world
Two days after France surrendered to the Nazis the Republicans met at Philadelphia to choose their presidential nominee
the frontrunners were mostly
isolationists
but the events in Europe shook the delegates and in the end they chose an unlikely but remarkable dark horse a
big rumpled corporate attorney from the Midwest who had once been a Democrat and who also believed the United States
had a crucial role to play abroad
Wendell Willkie
FDR believed him the most formidable candidate the Republicans could possibly have chosen
Roosevelt continued to remain silent about whether or not he would break with tradition and run for a third term
He continued to keep his own counsel did nothing to discourage others from announcing their candidacies
including his own former campaign manager Jim Farley and
He refused to attend the upcoming Democratic convention in Chicago
claiming the international situation
Was far too grave
Instead he dispatched his close advisor Harry Hopkins to try to organize a supposedly spontaneous draft
Many delegates
southern conservatives
Farley loyalists those opposed to a third term for any man felt used and angry
Labor secretary Frances Perkins called FDR from Chicago pleading with him to appear personally and calm things down
If he didn't she said he wouldn't have the party behind him in the fall
He refused to come but suggested. She asked his wife if she would appear on his behalf
Eleanor Roosevelt was at val-kill
listening to the convention on the radio
There had been changes in her inner circle her friendship with Nancy cook and Marion Dickerman
With whom she'd built her cottage had cooled
She saw less of Lorena Hickok and Earl Miller, too
But with her this evening was a new friend and confidant a former youth leader named Joseph lash
Who had become a sort of surrogate son?
The Democrats were in trouble she told him they hadn't ended
Unemployment they now seemed about to break the know third term, ban
Which she believed was a very great tradition?
And she felt that her husband had already served his purpose in history
The phone rang
It was Frances Perkins
Would she go to Chicago?
only if the president asked her himself she answered she
Wanted to be coaxed and she wanted Franklin to do the coaxing
She spoke to FDR
Well, would you like to go he asked? No. I wouldn't like to go. I'm very busy. Do you really want me to go?
Yes, he finally answered perhaps. It would be a good idea
She boarded a plane and headed to Chicago
Meanwhile as the nominations began
Senator alben Barkley of Kentucky the convention chairman told the delegates he had a message for them from the President
As Bartley finished a single disembodied voice began a chant
Delegates joined in
It was later discovered that the chanting was led by the Chicago Superintendent of sewers
broadcasting from somewhere in the basement
Roosevelt was renamed innate 'add on the first ballot
But then word came that FDR wanted Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace as his vice president a
rebellion began to brew
Wallace was too liberal for many conservatives he had never run for office, and he had once been a Republican
FDR wouldn't budge
Damn it to hell. He said they will go for Wallace, or I won't run
To emphasize that he meant it he wrote out a statement
If the Democrats could not unite behind a liberal ticket. He would decline the honor of their nomination
Eleanor arrived just before the vice presidential nominations began and took a seat beside mrs. Wallace
When Wallace's name was introduced delegates booed and jeered
Then just before the vote Eleanor rose to speak
The convention fell silent no first lady had ever spoken to a national convention before
She thanked Jim Farley for his lifetime of service to the Democratic Party and
Then called upon the delegates to rally to a cause greater than themselves
After Eleanor's speech the United convention nominated Henry Wallace for vice president on the first ballot
The audience had been just like lambs she said
When Harry Hopkins escorted her back to the airport for the flight home
She told him you young things don't know politics
FDR frequently does not credit Eleanor Roosevelt, or thank her to her face, but he'll thank her publicly
like the Democratic convention in 1940
He tells people how wonderful. She was and she says
Out loud and in public and on the ready well. He never told me that he thought that and
So there's a little tension always and a little hurt always
But there's an abiding
respect and admiration and love
The homecoming for Wendell Willkie its most distinguished son and the waiting throngs get their first glimpse of the candidate and mrs.
Wilke shaking hands with old friends along the way Wilkie comes back home to Indiana
as Wilkie barnstormed back and forth across the country
Roosevelt tried to remain above the political battle as
A sign of bipartisanship he named two eminent Republicans to his cabinet
Henry L Stimson as Secretary of War and as Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox
Who had fought alongside Theodore Roosevelt as a rough rider?
To issues demanded immediate attention and either one could have lost him the election
First he needed a military draft. It would be the first military draft in peacetime in US history
But initially he didn't dare publicly support a bill for it that was working its way through Congress
for fear of Republican attack
opponents besieged Capitol Hill
mothers groups college students
clergymen
if you pass this bill said senator Burton K
wheeler of Montana you slit the throat of the last democracy still living
Then Wendell Willkie defied his advisors and many in his own party
and came out in favor of the draft bill as the best way to shore up the nation's defenses a
Relieved Roosevelt now
Enthusiastically endorsed it too
It was he said
America's answer to hitlerism
More than 16 million men between the ages of 21 and 35 were registered on the draft rolls
But Roosevelt also needed to find a way to respond to Winston Churchill's desperate calls for help
German bombs were now falling on London
An all-out German assault across the English Channel seemed likely
Arming Britain was nothing more than a guess FDR admitted to a member of his cabinet
If he guessed wrong and Britain fell he would have accomplished nothing
except further to enrage Hitler
Joseph Kennedy
Roosevelt's ambassador in London believed Britain's surrender inevitable
So did the president's top military commanders?
They argued that America's military needs should take precedence over those of any foreign power
In
1940 when we were only 18th and military power
Isolationist country no one here wanting us to get involved in Europe's Wars
he took the
Enormous chance of giving England everything he could despite the Joint Chiefs saying to him if you do this in England Falls. You'll be impeached
FDR overruled them all on
September 2nd
1944 Durr transferring 50 overage destroyers to Britain in
exchange for leases on British bases in the Western Hemisphere
Congress was not consulted
Isolationists were outraged there was talk again of impeachment
students at Yale University
formed the America first committee
Dedicated to impregnable national defense, but no help whatsoever for embattled Britain
hundreds of thousands signed up including Charles Lindbergh and the actress Lillian Gish
the poet Robert Frost and the composer Charles Ives and two Ivy Leaguers
Gerald Ford and John F. Kennedy
He was governing a country
Peopled by the descendants of people who came here to get away from there
To get away from the old world and its entanglements than its bloodshed and all the rest
Broad oceans Placid neighbors, what do we care about those people over there?
and
He had to be very careful to the point of
Assuring people late in the 1940 campaign that American boys would not die in foreign wars. He knew better probably by that time
The Oyster Bay Roosevelt's like the rest of the country were divided over the issue
Kermit Roosevelt who had always remained friendly with Franklin and Eleanor was already serving in the British Army
But Theodore Roosevelt jr.
campaigned against US involvement and when Alice Roosevelt
Longworth told a reporter that rather than vote for a third term for Franklin
She'd cast her ballot for Hitler the president told Eleanor
He didn't want to have anything to do with that damned woman again
Republicans tried to keep the third term issue alive but both sides realized the real issue was the war
Rizzo veldt had always been careful to say that the United States would never go to war
except in case of attack in
Boston where many Irish voters opposed any aid to Britain he deliberately dropped even that qualifier
while I'm talking to you Father I
give you one more assurance I
Have said this before but
I shall say a game and the game
Going
That hypocritical son-of-a-bitch Wilkie said when he heard Roosevelt's Boston pledge, this is going to beat me
Today no one can honestly promise you peace at home or abroad
Or any human being can do is to promise that he will do his utmost to
prevent his country from being involved in war
On
Election night at Springwood the returns were at first so close that even
FDR's optimism faltered momentarily, and he has to be left alone but
By the end of the evening the tide had once again turned toward Roosevelt
He won 449 electoral votes to Wilkie's 82
At midnight he was brought outside to greet his neighbors
We of course face difficult days in this country. He told them
But I think you will find me in the future just the same Franklin Roosevelt you have known a great many years
My heart has always been here it always will be
Because this is the first time a president has been elected for a third term I
looked at my children at the president's mother and then at the president himself and
Wondered what each one was feeling down in their heart of hearts I?
Feel that any citizen should be willing to give all that he has to give to his country
in work all sacrifice in times of crisis
Roosevelt saw st. World War as the Great War of national liberation
That democracies were gonna spring up around the world and they would be looking to America for some paternal guidance perhaps
Some of the old Wilson in him
But it was Roosevelt's
Capacity and ability to talk about the world as a neighborhood that really began to change how Americans saw the world
Roosevelt was dictating his for freedom speech and
Said we shall be for freedom of speech everywhere in the world
We shall be for freedom from want everywhere in the world and Harry Hopkins interrupted him and said mr.. President
I don't think you should say everywhere in the world because Americans aren't gonna give a damn about people in Java
And FDR came right back at him, and he said we know Harry
They're gonna have to give a damn about people in Java from now on
In his State of the Union message for 1941 Roosevelt
Tried to describe the kind of world he hoped would emerge from the war
Everywhere in the world
Freedom from want
Which means economic?
understanding which will secure to every nation a
healthy peacetime life
for its inhabitants
Everywhere in the world
Fourth
Is freedom from fear?
Which translated in the world term
Means a worldwide
reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion
That no nation will be in a position
to commit an act of physical aggression
against any neighbor anywhere in the world
That is no vision of a distant millennium, it is a definite basis for a kind of world
attainable in our own time and
generation
That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so called new order of tyranny
Which the dictators seek to create?
Of a bomb
He had a gift that Theodore didn't have and that was the gift of eloquence of
Being able to deliver
Speeches that made people want to rise to do better than they thought they could
And very few presidents have had that
Now Roosevelt redoubled his efforts at aiding Hitler's enemies
We shall send in ever-increasing numbers ship plane
gun that is our purpose and
Played when Britain could no longer pay for arms. He devised lend-lease
Allowing him to continue providing those ships planes tanks and guns
So long as the British promised to return them when the war was over
Roosevelt compared it to lending a neighbor a garden hose
Lend-lease was
deft politics in the virtuous assembling of a man
determined to
Gently and for the best of motives trick the country into moving in a direction. It did not want to go
It was shrewd
It was tiny cat feet tiptoeing into an international conflict by almost
imperceptible and utterly unthreatening increments
After Hitler sent his legions into the Soviet Union on June 22nd 1941 Roosevelt
Persuaded Congress to extend lend-lease to Russia as well
the Red Army would now be trying to repel the invaders with trucks made by the Ford Motor Company and
When Nazi submarines preyed on convoys carrying American supplies in the North Atlantic?
he first ordered naval vessels to shoot on sight and
Then got Congress to arm American merchant ships
Soon the United States would be engaged in a deadly, but undeclared war at sea
Roosevelt faced a threat from the other side of the world as well
Where he feared Japan was about to make good on?
Theodore Roosevelt's old prophecy of an attack on American Holdings in the Pacific that would lead to what TR had called
one of the most disastrous
Conflicts the world has ever seen
Japan's military leaders had been on the move for a decade
They had attacked, China
taken advantage of the war in Europe to sign a defense pact with Germany and Italy and
stationed troops in French, Indochina
Roosevelt warned them to go no further
He halted the sale of aviation fuel and scrap metal and when that did not work
Froze their assets in the United States to prevent the purchase of the American supplies. They needed to continue their advance
And
As a deterrent he dispatched a large part of the Pacific Fleet to Hawaii
to the naval base at Pearl Harbor
And if you would have asked me I would tell you frankly in domestic policy
Eleanor Roosevelt having the luxury of not being responsible to constituencies
Not having complicated presidential relationships with a complicated party that controlled Congress being
emancipated from these practicalities
She could peer over the horizon, and she saw rather well the coming issues of race and of poverty
In part it was her dependability
That people who believed in liberal values know she would stand up at every moment in time for those values
People who were poor knew that she'd be fighting for them people who were migrant workers knew she'd be there
people who are miners knew that she climbed down to a mine, and then tell FDR what he needed to do and
Most importantly I think African Americans knew that she would be their champion
The growth of defense industries put six million Americans to work in just 12 months
with thousands more signing on every day
the focus on defense had revived the economy and
Eleanor Roosevelt shared her husband's wish to ready the country for the war both feared was coming
But she was concerned that hundreds of thousands of Americans through no fault of their own were being left out
Firms that had never hired black workers saw no reason to change their policy
We have not had a Negro worker in 25 years
Said the standard steel corporation of Kansas City and do not plan to start now
African-americans had voted overwhelmingly for Franklin Roosevelt in
1940 and were bitterly
Disappointed when the president backed away from what they had thought was a private pledge to end the old policy of
segregating the Armed Forces and allow black and white Americans
to fight for their country side-by-side
Discrimination in defense jobs was the last straw in the spring of 1941 a philip randolph
president of the Brotherhood of sleeping car porters
threatened to bring
100,000 black protestors to Washington on July 1st unless something was done about it
FDR feared bloodshed, Washington was a Jim Crow City
Randolph refused to back down the president asked his wife to see what she could do
The first lady had advocated an anti-lynching bill her husband had not been able to support that
outraged white Southerners by visiting black colleges and
posing with their students and
When a Birmingham Alabama policeman told her she could not sit among black citizens at a segregated meeting
She had moved her chair between the black and white sections to demonstrate the absurdity of the situation now
She did as her husband suggested you know where I stand she told Randolph
but she went on the March would be a very grave mistake I
Am afraid it will set back the progress which is being made towards better opportunities and less segregation
Randolf respectfully refused to back off his deadline grew closer
The first lady persuaded FDR that he had better meet with Randolph and her friend Walter White of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People
Together they helped negotiate the language of a new executive order
It created a Fair Employment Practices Commission to combat discrimination in defense plants
The F EPC had no enforcement powers it could only investigate complaints and issue directives
Asking that discrimination be eliminated
But it represented the first federal action on civil rights since reconstruction
Randolph called off his march
When Eleanor Roosevelt got word that her husband had finally signed executive order 8802
She wired him I hope from this first step. We may go on to others a
Woman wrote to the Commission and tell them how her son was discriminated against
and in the letter she added
Please let me hear from you at once
Because mr. President if you cannot do anything I need to write to mrs.. Roosevelt
So there was that confidence that mrs. Roosevelt wouldn't get him done
But she was also ahead of people in trying to open up opportunity
When Franklin Roosevelt signed the executive order that
Forced companies through incentives and sanctions to open their doors to black Americans
it had a huge impact on the whole civil rights movement for the future because
Young black men and women got jobs at skill levels. They had never enjoyed before and
They were part of that sense of accomplishment that the country felt when they saw those ships being produced
When they saw those tanks being made or the planes being rolled out onto the field?
They knew they'd been part of that energy
On
June 5th
1941 a new name appeared on FDR's appointment calendar
mrs. Paul Johnson
Only Missy lehand and a few other members of the president's innermost circle knew her true identity
Back in 1918
Roosevelt had promised his wife. He would never see his old love Lucy Mercer again and
She had married Winthrop Rutherford a wealthy widower far older than she
But she and the president had quietly kept in touch
He'd made sure she had a ticket to each of his inaugurations
White House operators had orders to put through calls from mrs.. Johnson
Now Lucy's husband whom she had cared for faithfully for years had been incapacitated by illness and
Franklin had invited her to come and see him at the White House
Elinor was away
Lucy was discreetly led in a back way and ushered into the family quarters for a quiet dinner
The evening before mrs.. Rutherford's first visit the president's personal secretary
Missy lehand who had always seen herself as the closest person to the man
She called FD had suddenly collapsed at a staff party
She had suffered the first of two strokes. That would rob her of the power of speech
She was put to bed in her room on the third floor of the White House
Roosevelt was wheeled in every day to visit
She did not improve was sent to Warm Springs
brought back to the White House finally moved back in with her family in Somerville, Massachusetts as
Always Roosevelt hid his feelings
But he quietly called in his lawyer, and had his will changed so that in the event of his death
half of his estate would go to pay for her care I
Owed her that much. He told his son James
She served me so well for so long and asked so little in return
Meanwhile Lucy Rutherford continued to come to the White House from time to time for tea or dinner and
Sometimes she and the president took quiet rides together through Rock Creek Park
Always when eleanor was out of town
New, London, Connecticut
August 3rd
1941
Dropping the cares of official duties for long sought rest at sea
President Roosevelt sailed tonight from the New London submarine base for weeks saltwater vacation
The presidential yacht Potomac headed into Long Island Sound in the afterglow of sunset
To take the chief executive away from the tension of duties
Which the critical international situation has made unusually wearing?
the New York Times
August 5th dear Daisy
Even at my ripe old age I feel a thrill in making a getaway especially from the American press
Curiously enough the Potomac still flies my flag and
Tonight will be seen by thousands as she passes through the Cape Cod Canal
While in fact the president will be about 250 miles away
All his life
FDR loved knowing secrets no one else knew and nothing pleased him more than to be able to sail north
Undetected to rendezvous for the first time with the Prime Minister of Great Britain
Argentia Bay, Newfoundland
Saturday August 9th
1941
dear, Daisy
the huge new HMS Prince of Wales came up the bay with two escorting Corvettes an
Anchored alongside of us at 9:30
Winston Churchill came on board at 11:00. We all met on the top deck and were duly photographed and then
Churchill stayed on board and lunched with me alone
He is a tremendously vital person and in many ways is an English male LaGuardia
don't say I said so I
Like him and lunching alone broke the ice both ways
in
August 1941
Churchill is desperate to figure out how to engage FDR's heart
How do you get him into the struggle which Churchill was basically fighting alone?
He decides to use the language and imagery of faith the world of Groton of st. James Church
the high
Anglican world from which Roosevelt came
Churchill picked three hymns
Eternal Father strong to save Oh God our help in ages past and
onward Christian soldiers
On the way back from the service
FDR said to his son Elliot with no expectation that it would be repeated onward Christian soldiers
We are Christian soldiers, and we will go on with God's help
If nothing else had happened while we were here that would have cemented us
Roosevelt still could not commit American forces to the struggle against Hitler
But he and Churchill issued. What came to be called the Atlantic Charter?
It called for the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny
it also pledged a post-war world in which every nation controlled its own destiny an
End to the kind of colonialism Winston Churchill had stood for all his life
As the conference at sea ended back in Washington Congress extended the service of draftees
From one year to two and a half years
but by just a single vote
Had it not done, so it would have dangerously weakened the newly built army
On
Saturday morning September 6th 1941
FDR made an unscheduled visit to Springwood
Sara Delano Roosevelt now 86 was failing as
Always, she was eager to see him
When my son comes and sits there beside me with the smile, that is not reserved for the voters
She'd once told a friend. I just looked at his face and think it has everything
wisdom goodness and
sweetness
He was rolled into her room and spent the day with her telling her about his talks with Churchill talking over old times
pausing only to read dispatches from the White House
Late that evening she lapsed into a coma
she died of heart failure the following afternoon a
Few minutes later without wind or rain or lightning
The greatest of all the great oak trees on the Roosevelt estate groaned and toppled to the ground
Geologists would later blame an especially thin layer of earth that blanketed a base of solid rock
But those who had known Sarah Delano Roosevelt were not so sure
She was buried in the little graveyard behind, st. James Church where her husband had been laid to rest
41 years earlier
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a friend that while she personally felt no deep affection or sense of loss at her mother-in-law's death
It is hard on Franklin
It was hard and
Whenever he could in the coming years
He and sometimes his daughter Anna would stop by the grave of the mother who had taught him to believe he would
Succeed at whatever he set out to do that no task was too great for him to take on
That big house without his mother seems awfully big and bear
She gave him that personal affection, which his friends and secretaries cannot do in the same way
he was always my boy, and he seems to me often rather pathetic and
Hungry for just that kind of thing
Daisy Suckley
Daisy Suckley the president's worshipful cousin had once dreamed of living with Franklin in the hilltop cottage
She'd helped him plan
The war and the third term had shattered that dream
But FDR gave her a job as archivist in his new library so that she could be with them whenever he felt the need of
quiet admiring company and
She looked after fala the mischievous Scotty that had been her gift to him
And that would become the most famous dog on earth
His wife is a wonderful person, but she lacks the ability to give him the things his mother gave him
She is waste so much and when she is here. She has so many people around the
Splendid people who were trying to do good and improve the world
The uplifters the president calls them that he cannot relax and really rest
Eleanor Roosevelt suffered a loss of her own that same month
Hall Roosevelt the younger brother for whom she'd felt responsible since the early deaths of their parents
Died in a Washington Hospital as she sat helpless at his bedside
He had been bright and promising when young filled with all the Roosevelt energy and
had become an able engineer and city official
But the curse of alcoholism that had killed his father
Destroyed him too
My idea of hell if I believed in it Eleanor confided to her friend Joe lash before the end came
Would be to sit and watch someone breathing hard
struggling for words when a gleam of consciousness returns and
Thinking this was once the little boy. I played with and scolded
he could have been so much and
This is what he is
On
the morning of September 29th less than two weeks after her mother-in-law died just two days after
burying her brother
Eleanor left the White House grounds without an escort and walked eight blocks north to Dupont Circle
To a brand new office and a brand new job
New York Mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia
director of the newly created Office of Civil Defence had asked her to become his
unsalaried assistant in charge of civilian volunteers
She saw her new job as a chance to keep the spirit of the New Deal alive even under the threat of war
effective defense she insisted demanded better nutrition better
housing better day-to-day medical care better education better
recreation for every age
But she quickly ran into trouble federal agencies resisted incursions onto their territory
Southern mayor's resented her determination to recruit black as well as white volunteers
When she hired a dancer friend to help with physical training
Congress passed a resolution meant to ridicule her by banning the use of public funds for fan dancing
mrs. Roosevelt a Michigan woman wrote to her you would be doing a great service if you would simply go home and so for the
Red Cross
Every time you open your mouth the people of this country
Dislike and mistrust more
Within four months Eleanor Roosevelt would feel she had no choice, but to resign
People can understand that an individual even if she is a president's wife
may have
independent views and
Must be allowed the expression of an opinion
But actual participation in the work of the government we are not yet able to accept
Ladies and gentlemen
I'm speaking to you at a very serious moment in our history
The cabinet is convening and the leaders in Congress are meeting with the president
The State Department and Army and Navy officials have been with the president all afternoon on Sunday morning December
7th 1941
Japanese planes had attacked Pearl Harbor
All afternoon news reports repeated the same meager information
The president did not plan to address Congress until the following day
But that evening on her weekly radio program
it fell to the first lady of the United States of America to try to reassure her frightened fellow citizens about
What lay ahead for?
months now the knowledge that something of this kind might happen has been hanging over our heads and
Yet, it seemed impossible to believe
impossible to drop the everyday things of life and
Feel that there was only one thing which was important
Preparation to meet an enemy no matter where he struck
That is all over now, and there is no more uncertainty
we know what we have to face and
We know that we are ready to face it
I should like to say just a word to the women in the country tonight I
Have a boy at sea on a destroyer for all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific
Many of you all over this country have boys in the services who will now be called upon to go into action
You cannot escape a clutch of beer at your heart, and yet, I hope you will rise above these fears
Whatever is asked of us. I am sure we can accomplish it
We are the free and uncomfortable people of the United States of America
Meanwhile the president was grim but relieved
You know the Secretary of the Navy said to Frances Perkins
I think the boss must have a great load off his mind
I thought the load on his mind was just going to kill him at least we know what to do now
Americans had broken the Japanese code
Roosevelt knew an attack in the Pacific was imminent, but he expected it to be launched against British and Dutch
outposts not, Hawaii
This wasn't simply the way he was going to get the United States into war this was a debacle of the first order
And for Roosevelt this was supremely personal
Roosevelt had laid the keel for the battleship that became the USS, Arizona
Roosevelt looked on those ships at pearl harbors though. They were his babies
And it was said that the comest person in the room in the White House that day was Franklin Roosevelt
Absorbing the information as it came in slowly figuring out what to do?
Giving that unflappability to the people around him so that they then got strength from his own strength
It was one of those moments when you saw what he was made of
Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands
Last night the Japanese attacked week island
And this morning the Japanese attacked, Midway Island
Japan has therefore undertaken a surprise offensive
extending throughout the Pacific area I
Ask
the Congress declare a
state of war has
existed between
the United States and the Japanese Empire
The following day
Wearing a mourning armband in memory of his mother
FDR would sign the declaration of war
on
December 11th Hitler and Mussolini siding with their Japanese ally declared war on the United States
We got a big assist from Hitler
Who in a fit of absent-mindedness and contempt?
Declared war on us without thinking it through
And
That is a sign of FDR's
Political skill and deafness that he waited and made Hitler take the first move against the United States
So there could be no public reluctance at all in our ultimate struggle to get to Berlin
All four of the president's sons had volunteered
So did all three of Theodore Roosevelt's surviving sons
six of TRS grandsons who were old enough to serve also signed on with
the country under attack political differences were forgotten
It seems to me Archie Roosevelt wrote FDR
That regardless of the bitterness that many people feel toward the Hyde Park Roosevelt's or the Oyster Bay Roosevelt's
They have to admit that the whole clan has turned out to a man
It is something in which I think we can take a certain amount of pride
Washington December 24th 1941
The president who has been very mysterious as to what was going to happen over the holidays
Finally decided to tell me that the British prime minister
Mr.. Winston Churchill, and his party were arriving sometime in the late afternoon or evening
It had not occurred to him this might require
Certain moving of furniture to adapt rooms for the purposes for which the Prime Minister wish to use them
The White House had changed since December 7th
Armed sentries now stood guard to keep tourists off the grounds
There were machine-gun emplacements on the roof and blackout curtains over the windows
But FDR had refused to allow the Secret Service to camouflage the White House and
Insisted that the annual Christmas tree ceremony take place as scheduled as a sign of continuity in wartime
the Prime Minister of Great Britain concurred
Let the children have their night of fun and laughter
Let the gift of father Christmas they like their play
That are grown up
They were brought together by force of circumstance
They were men who as CS Lewis once put it
We picture lovers face-to-face, but friends side by side their eyes look ahead
They shared a common interest a common bond the defeat of Hitler and the security of their own places in history
They both saw themselves as great historical actors as great heirs of familial and national political traditions
One was the cousin of a president the other was the son of a man who had been an enormous Lee important?
Victorian politician
Churchill was a Marlborough Roosevelt was a Roosevelt
They heard the music of history in their heads
And they were devoted to the idea that they could save the world
So he's got that happy Christmas to you all
The message from that whole visit at Christmas
Was that?
the forces of democracy were at last together
an
FDR in a toast at dinner when Churchill was in the White House said
to the common cause
Which I can now truly say is a common cause
The Prime Minister was the Roosevelt's guest for three weeks
night after night
FDR sat up with him till 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning
Churchill needed little sleep but lots of alcohol
Sherry before breakfast scotch and Soda before lunch
champagne and brandy in the evening
Eleanor Roosevelt disapproved of the drinking and the late hours, and she worried about the Prime Minister's unshakable
devotion to the sprawling British Empire
Which both she and her husband believed should not be allowed to survive long after the war
but she liked him he
And her husband she said looked like boys playing soldier
They seemed to be having a wonderful time
Once according to Harry Hopkins the president came up with what he thought was a grand idea
The 26 countries now pledged to subscribe to the principles of the Atlantic Charter
Should be called the United Nations
He had himself wheeled across the hall and entered his distinguished guests bedroom without knocking
So that he could tell him about it
Churchill had just climbed out of the bathtub
naked pink and gleaming
FDR apologized for bursting in
nothing to apologize for
Churchill said the Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States
On the Pacific front bad news was coming in from everywhere
Roosevelt and Churchill received the dispatches together
Japanese troops have landed in Thailand and Singapore
Burma and Borneo
Hong Kong and the Philippines
Where they were driving American forces down the Bataan, Peninsula
the American public was clamoring for revenge
On the other side of the globe the Germans occupied almost all of Europe
were threatening Egypt and the Suez Canal in North Africa and
Were moving steadily toward Moscow
along a thousand-mile front
Back in the White House
Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that Germany with its vast armies and mighty
Industrial machine would have to be defeated first
But that would take time
To mobilize train and equip a force powerful enough to destroy Hitler's armies
Until that time the Allies would have to remain on the defensive in the Pacific
In February of 42 the country was at a very low ebb of morale we were losing battles in the Pacific
So Roosevelt decided he was going to give a speech
And he asked everybody to get a map before them, so he could tell them the far-flung battles of the war
The man who ran CS Hammonds map store in New York said he sold more maps that single week, then he'd sold an entire year
Roosevelt gets on the radio everybody's sitting there with their map spread before them he explains the battles
But most importantly what he does is to warn people that there will be failures before there is victory
We will have losses before we have wins
Then he reminded people that Washington had stood by Valley Forge when the supplies were almost done
the Pioneers going over the Rocky Mountains the early days of the Civil War
We will get through this
Let them let the general and his men
Let them back to the Marine
And
There were so many telegrams that came in to the White House that night
That speech was so effective that they said you've got to go in the radio every day. It's the only way morale will be sustained
But he wrote back with knowing inside. He said if my speeches ever become routine they will lose their effectiveness
So he only delivered 30 fireside chats in his 12 years
Which meant that everybody listened when those chats were delivered?
Saul Bellow said you could walk down the street on a hot Chicago night, and everybody would have the radio on
So you could hear it coming out of the windows of the cars
Coming out of the windows of the houses and not miss a word of his speech if he had done it too often
He would have lost that
The initial German invasion of the Soviet Union had stalled outside Moscow
But a Spring Offensive in
1942 sent
225 fresh divisions more than four and a half million men
racing across Russia
Joseph Stalin the Soviet premier
Demanded the Allies open a second front in Western Europe
To relieve the pressure on his beleaguered people
American planners had a straightforward idea of how to beat the Germans
invade France in the spring of 1943 and drive right for Berlin
but the British
Haunted by memories of the butchery on the western front in the Great War were wary of moving so fast
A defeat on the French coast Churchill warned was the only way in which we could possibly lose this war
Instead he favored attacking German and Italian forces in North Africa
To keep Egypt and the oil fields of the Middle East from falling into enemy hands
American commanders thought invading Africa would be a dangerous wasteful diversion
rather than accept the British plan general Marshall proposed that the United States
Abandoned the Germany first strategy and go on the offensive in the pacific
Roosevelt overruled him a
Premature attack in the Pacific was exactly what Germany wanted he wrote
It would only mean the recapture of a lot of islands and would do nothing to help the Russians
The proposal was therefore disapproved. He signed his response Roosevelt commander-in-chief
The invasion of occupied France would have to be delayed
Preparations began for American troops to land in North Africa
Meanwhile the news from the Pacific continued to be bad
But even the president's critics were astonished at his serenity
Once he had made a decision nothing seemed to faze him
Franklin had learned from his struggle against polio his wife said that if there was nothing you could do about a situation
Then you'd better try to put it out of your mind
The President worked at his stamp collection
chatted with visitors
presided over a carefree cocktail hour every afternoon he
Established his own secret map room in a former ladies cloakroom in the White House basement
so that he could personally follow the movements of American ships and armies a
Special pin marked the whereabouts of the destroyer aboard which his son Franklin was serving
When Roosevelt was rolled into the map room every morning that was always the first pin he looked for
Wartime security allowed the President to spend as much time as possible out of public sight and away from the White House
At the Center for polio patients he'd created at Warm Springs, Georgia
At a new hideaway in the Catoctin mountains of Maryland that he called shangri-la
which would later come to be called Camp David and
At home at Springwood where the grounds were now patrolled day and night
He was there on May 6th when he learned that Corregidor the last
American outpost in the Philippines had surrendered
Just four days later before dawn he
Daisy Suckley and a handful of aids and secret servicemen drove to a nearby pond to take part in the annual
census of Dutchess County birds
From the back seat of his car a seemingly unconcerned FDR claimed to have identified
108 species 22 of them by their songs alone
He seemed really to enjoy every minute
It is the kind of thing he has privately given up any idea of ever doing again
So it did him lots of good in
That far-off silent place with myriads of birds waking up
it was quite impossible to think much of the horrors of war I
Think Roosevelt handled it bravely in the sense that the fundamental job in the Second World War was to mobilize the American economy
Congress granted Roosevelt sweeping wartime powers to reorganize American industry and
He made the most of them
The result was improvised
inconsistent and often inefficient
six new federal agencies with overlapping
Responsibilities were established in a single year
But it would make possible the defeat of Germany
Italy and Japan
If you're going to try to prepare for war in a capitalist country
Secretary of War Stimson said you have to let business make money out of the process
FDR now found himself working hand in glove
With many of the economic Royalists whose hatred he'd welcomed just five years earlier
The biggest companies got the biggest contracts and earned the biggest profits
Antitrust laws were overlooked taxes on ordinary Americans rose
Again and again. He urged industry to greater efforts
When advisors handed him estimates of what they thought could realistically be achieved
He crossed them out and wrote in larger numbers of his own
The production people can do it if they really try he said
They did try and they did do it
His role was to mobilize the forces of the American people behind the war
without the productivity that this country was able to marshal by three hundred thousand planes and two million trucks and
Five thousand cargo ships we would never have had the supplies which we gave to our allies in all four corners of the world
to win that war
He was directly responsible for getting this country to hum again
To support the soldiers at every step along the way
Idle factories were soon back in business
Nearly all manufacturing was converted to the war effort
In 1941 more than 3 million cars had been manufactured in the United States
Only 139 more were made during the entire war
Instead Chrysler made fuselages
General Motors made airplane engines guns trucks and tanks and
that its vast Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan
67 acres of assembly lines under a single roof that one observer called the Grand Canyon of the mechanized world
The Ford Motor Company performed something like a miracle 24 hours a day
the average Ford car had some
15,000 parts the b-24 liberator long-range bomber at 1 million
550,000 parts one came off the line at Willow Run every 63 minutes
War mobilization would give the Allies the crushing superiority in arms Roosevelt insisted they needed for victory
It also brought the Great Depression to an end
Creating so many new jobs so fast, but for the first time in a generation
There was soon a labor shortage in the United States
The great battles of the Second World War the defeat of the Third Reich was accomplished using American weapons
So the job was to do what the brain trusters and the New Deal mentality wanted to do anyway
Which was mobilize the American people into a great collective effort?
And that's what war is
Ellinor feared when the war came that she would no longer have the centrality that she had enjoyed with him during the 1930s
Similar fears that when she first became first lady that she wouldn't be as needed or wanted
But boy she found a way once again
Eleanor Roosevelt continued to share her husband's sense of urgency about American defense and
Like any other mother she had wept when her boys went off to war
But she was also unhappy with what seemed to her to be FDR's
abandonment of reform
The president was now consumed with mobilization and the war
He made only token objections when Congress voted to end the Civilian Conservation
Corps the Works Progress Administration
the National Youth administration
He was dr. Win the war now he explained no longer dr. New Deal
Further domestic progress would have to wait till the fighting ended
Eleanor Roosevelt would not easily accept that decision
If he were no longer interested in listening to other new dealers she would speak for them
no one who ever saw Eleanor Roosevelt facing her husband and aide remembered and
Holding his I firmly say to him
Franklin I think you should or
Franklin's surely, you will not will ever forget the experience
She initially supported FDR's decision to inter behind barbed wire some
110,000 japanese-americans
Who happen to live along the west coast?
two-thirds of them American citizens I
Recognized she told a friend it has to be done
But when she realized that stories of internee disloyalty were untrue
That they were being singled out only because of their race
She made an unannounced visit to one of their camps
lobbied her husband to close them all and
Was only dissuaded from bringing an interned family home to live in the White House when he told her the Secret Service
Would not allow it
It is blood on your hands mrs. Roosevelt
You have been personally proclaiming and practicing social equality at the White House and wherever you go
Jackson, Mississippi Daily News
During the war
hundreds of thousands of black Americans moved north where they found defense jobs and
Trouble from a society not yet willing to accommodate them
In 1943 alone there were race riots in 47 cities
35 people died in Detroit I
Suppose the first lady said when one is forced to realize that an unwelcome change is coming
One must blame it on someone or something
She was painfully aware of the absurdity of
Continuing to ask young African Americans to fight for democracy
While serving in armed forces that were still segregated
Unless we make the country worth fighting for by Negroes she wrote one of her critics
We will have nothing to offer the world at the end of the war
Eleanor Roosevelt had also battled on behalf of admitting Jewish refugees to the United States
For as long as the Nazis were willing to grant them exit visas
Restrictive immigration laws frustrated her
So did the actions of obstructionists within the State Department?
Some genuinely concerned that German spies would slip into the country
some blatantly anti-semitic and
She had been unable to persuade FDR to get rid of those bureaucrats
He had been the only leader of a democratic nation to dare denounced the Nazi mistreatment of Jews after crystal nacht
in 1938
When news began to reach him at the end of 1942 that the Germans had moved on from
mistreatment to mass murder
He joined Churchill and Stalin and ten allied governments in exile in
promising to prosecute and punish
those responsible for what they called this beast Jill policy of cold-blooded
extermination and
He eventually
Created the war refugee board that provided funds and authorization
to help Jews flee from the edges of the Nazi Empire
Roosevelt understood that Hitler was the master of Europe
Europe's Jews were his prisoners and
intended victims and
As he told a Jewish visitor we cannot treat these matters in normal ways
We are dealing with an insane man
There was nothing else to do he believed other than to obliterate that madman and his monstrous regime
Saturday November 8th 1942
shangri-la a
historic day
After dinner as we were getting settled in chairs
he said at 9:00 that something will break on the radio and
At 9:00, we got the news of the landing of our troops on North Africa
It was thrilling and for the president it was a tremendous climax
The landings went smoothly
Casualties were low
Thank God Roosevelt said thank God
But the raw US troops soon found the fighting far tougher than they'd expected
It would take seven bloody months to drive the Germans from North Africa
Elliott Roosevelt who had pulled strings to get into combat despite his bad eyesight
piloted unarmed reconnaissance planes again and again over enemy territory
In
January of
1943 Roosevelt
And Churchill made their way into the war zone to Casablanca in Morocco
Where FDR declared the Allies United in their goal?
Nothing less than unconditional surrender
In the Pacific American naval forces had already badly damaged the Japanese fleet at Midway
the Marines had captured most of Guadalcanal though at a fearful cost and
had raided make an island to
Where the president's eldest son Major James Roosevelt was awarded the Navy Cross for?
extraordinary heroism
Within a few weeks the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union would finally be halted at Stalingrad
allied troops would soon invade Sicily
Where Franklin juniors destroyer would be badly damaged and he would win the Silver Star for?
carrying one of his wounded sailors to safety under fire
Then the Allies would have to begin the long bloody struggle to take Italy
But the cross-channel invasion of France that the Russians were demanding that
everyone including the enemy knew had to come had been postponed yet again and
Was still more than a year away?
Major Kermit Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt's second son who had accompanied him on his last great adventure in South America
had never recovered from his father's death
He continued to suffer from crippling depression and like his uncle Elliot drank too much
His wife believed as Theodore Roosevelt had believed that depression would overwhelm Kermit unless he had a mission
Franklin Roosevelt gave him a commission in the Army and sent him to an airbase in Alaska
where he was to help establish a militia force of Aleuts and Eskimos in case of Japanese invasion just
The kind of assignment his father would have relished
It was too late
on May 31st
1943 US
Forces destroyed the enemy garrison on the island of Attu in the Aleutians
The Japanese threat to Alaska had been lifted
Four days later Kermit Roosevelt put his service revolver under his chin and pulled the trigger
It was thought best to tell his mother Edith 81 years old and still living at Sagamore Hill
That he had died of a heart attack
This trip to the South Pacific will be attacked as a political gesture
And I am so
Uncertain whether or not I am doing the right thing that I will start with a heavy heart
I'll go because other people think I should
and
Where I do see our soldiers
I'll try to make them feel that
Franklin really wants to know about them
In the summer of 1943
Eleanor Roosevelt undertook a five-week
25,000 mile trip to the South Pacific on behalf of the Red Cross
Hawaii
Australia and New Zealand and 17 islands
including Bora Bora
Samoa
Fiji
New Caledonia
Christmas Island and
Guadalcanal
Where she got to see her young friend Joe lash now a sergeant in the army?
Admiral William F
Bull Halsey commander in the South Pacific had been against her coming he had a war to fight
He said and no time to waste
Welcoming a visiting do-gooder
But when the first lady turned up and went to work
Halsey quickly changed his mind
Here is what Eleanor Roosevelt did in 12 hours?
She inspected two navy hospitals took a boat to an officer's rest home and had lunch there
returned and inspected an army hospital
Reviewed the second Marine Raider battalion
Made a speech at a service club
Attended a reception and was guest of honor at a dinner given by General Harmon
When I say that she inspected those hospitals, I don't mean that she shook hands with the chief medical officer
glanced into a sunroom and left I
Mean that she went into every ward stopped at every bed and spoke to every patient
What was his name? How did he feel was there anything he needed could she take a message home for him I?
Marveled at her hardihood
both physical and mental and
She saw patients who were grievously and Bruce and Lee wounded
But I marveled most at their expressions as she leaned over them
It was a sight. I will never forget
Over here one soldier said
she was something none of us had seen in over a year an
American mother
The family of every wounded soldier and sailor she visited got a personal letter
But just as her experience with the wounded of World War one had affected her
It took weeks for her to get over the impact of the horrors. She had seen
To the end of her life she would remember the smell of the burn wards
When she got back
Just as she had predicted
Republicans attacked her for junka tearing at the public's expense
The outcry and Congress is so great she confided to a friend that FDR feels. I should not use government
transportation or even go on any long trips for a while
Later, I'm sure. He'll say go ahead again, but just now it seems he wants a little peace
At the end of November
1943
the president traveled
8,000 miles to Tehran to confer again with Churchill and to meet for the first time with the Soviet premier
Joseph Stalin
Stalin was taciturn guarded perpetually suspicious
the bargaining was often tense
Roosevelt hoped the United States Russia Britain and China could work together once the war was over
Stalin whose Red Army was still bearing the brunt of the fighting was determined to hold on to the Eastern European countries
his men were capturing as they pushed the Germans back toward Berlin and
He insisted upon the fastest possible opening of a second front
Churchill resisted still hoping an assault on France could be delayed or somehow avoided altogether
Roosevelt an aide remembered sat in the middle by common consent the moderator
arbitrator and final authority
In the end the big three set the stage for victory
the Americans and British would invade occupied France in the spring of 1944
The Soviets would mount a simultaneous offensive from the east
The hope was that the Nazis would be crushed between them
But victory in Europe and in Asia still seemed very far away
March 26 Hyde Park
The president had mrs. Rutherford for lunch
Showed her his library then to top cottage and she didn't get away until about 6:30
At dinner he felt fever coming on again and went to bed
He has decided to go down to Washington in the morning to the Naval Hospital
Roosevelt had returned from Tehran
exhausted and suffering from what Admiral Ross McIntyre his physician and Surgeon General said was the flu
weeks went by
He did not get better
Grace Tully his longtime secretary who had taken over for Missy lehand
Noticed that his hands now shook so badly he had trouble lighting his cigarette
And he sometimes seemed to doze for a moment during dictation
She and Daisy Suckley were worried
So was the president's daughter Anna
she had recently moved back into the White House with her children and
With her mother away was now acting as her father's hostess
All three women feared Admiral McIntire was not up to the job of caring for the president
His expertise was sinuses
Something else was wrong Anna
insisted on answers on
March 27th
1944 her father agreed to be wheeled into Bethesda Naval Hospital
for an off-the-record examination by the chief of Cardiology
Lieutenant Commander Howard G Bruin Bruin
Was horrified by what he found
The president was suffering from congestive heart failure
His heart was dangerously enlarged
He was short of breath and suffering from severe hypertension for which there was then no effective treatment
Four days later three senior physicians confirmed the diagnosis
To reduce and slow the heart and to ease the strain on it
FDR was prescribed digitalis and put on a diet
He was told to cut his smoking in half urged not to work more than four hours a day
Everyone was sworn to the strictest secrecy
Admiral McIntire assured the press that FDR just had a touch of
persistent bronchitis
For a man of 62 plus. He said he was doing fine. I
Am more worried than I let anyone know Daisy Suckley confided to her diary
There must be something definitely wrong or they wouldn't have these consultations
1944 was another presidential election year
The cross-channel invasion of Europe was still weeks away
American forces have only just begun to fight their way Island by Island crossed the Pacific toward Japan
And although just a handful of people knew it the commander in chief
the most powerful man on earth
was seriously perhaps fatally ill
Tomorrow night on the Roosevelts d-day
a weary president goes to Warm Springs
He is completely let down
Which means that he is relaxed and able to rest and eleanor carries on courage is more
Exhilarating than fear and in the long run. It is easier the final chapter of the Roosevelts an intimate history
tomorrow night
on Masterpiece Mystery
Julia McKenzie returns us agatha christie's remarkable, Miss Marple living persons
Who've been drunk by a voodoo witch doctor to do his bidding?
If we don't act swiftly I fear another murder will be committed right under our noses a
Caribbean mystery Miss Marple one Masterpiece Mystery
To learn more about the rich history and legacy of one of the most influential families in American history go to pbs.org
slashed the Roosevelts
The Roosevelts an intimate history is available on blu-ray and DVD the companion book is also available
to order visit shoppbs.org or call
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