Previously on "The Roosevelts, "
FDR began an unprecedented third term.
Why is it do certain moments
produce exactly the right human beings?
Eleanor campaigned for civil rights.
There was that confidence
that Mrs. Roosevelt would get it done.
And America went to war.
I ask that the Congress declare a state of war.
And now the final chapter
of "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History."
In April of 1944
in the midst of the Second World War,
the greatest cataclysm in history,
the president of the United States
seemed to have vanished.
Wartime security had obscured Franklin Roosevelt's movements
ever since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
but this was different.
He was said to be vacationing "somewhere in the south, "
getting over a bout of bronchitis.
Actually, he was resting
on the sprawling south Carolina estate
of the financier Bernard Baruch.
Coast guard men and marines guarded the perimeter.
He had been secretly diagnosed with congestive heart failure.
His doctors feared for his life.
Reporters from the 3 wire services
were housed 8 miles away, told nothing
about the president's actual condition,
rarely able even to lay eyes on FDR.
His uncharacteristic silence was interrupted
by embarrassing headlines about him and his family.
His son Elliott's second wife won a divorce on the grounds
of "unkind, harsh, and tyrannical" treatment.
His sons marine lieutenant colonel James Roosevelt
and Navy lieutenant commander Franklin Roosevelt Jr.
Both received promotions.
Republican newspapers charged favoritism.
Despite the courage all of the Roosevelt boys
had shown in combat, gop*** congressmen
routinely attacked their war records,
claiming they were somehow being protected against harm.
Elliott Roosevelt, who flew 300 combat missions
and won the distinguished flying cross,
had written to his father that,
"I sometimes really hope that one of us gets killed
so that they'll stop picking on the rest of the family."
Democratic senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri
insisted the White House respond formally to a letter
from a constituent claiming that Mrs. Roosevelt
was using 4 cars and burning up 2,000 gallons
of precious rationed gasoline a month
gallivanting around the country.
Montana senator Burton K. Wheeler,
an isolationist Democrat
who had long since broken with the president,
predicted FDR's health would prevent him from running again,
adding, "I wouldn't vote for my own brother for a fourth term."
Franklin Roosevelt
so transformed the United States
that it was, in essence, a different land,
a different Republic from when he took office.
There was an acceptance in the White House
that government has a responsibility
not just to a few, but to all of the nation
that no subsequent president,
no matter how Conservative his views,
has ever been able to get away from.
Prior to Franklin Roosevelt,
the assumption was that the federal government
existed to produce the conditions
for the pursuit of happiness.
Franklin Roosevelt said, "why stop there?"
The federal government can, in no small measure,
deliver happiness understood as material well-being.
No one was president longer.
No one defined the office in quite such personal terms.
You know, it used to be said
that Franklin Roosevelt's philosophy of the presidency
was himself in it,
and I think a lot of Americans came to agree with that.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt
had already occupied the White House
for more than 11 years.
Millions of Americans could remember no other first family
and had a hard time imagining another,
especially so long as the country
and the world were still at war.
FDR wanted to see the struggle through to victory
and then to do what Woodrow Wilson
had been unable to do after the first world war...
bring the United States into a new international organization
strong enough to ensure
that the world would not go to war again.
Then, he told his devoted cousin Daisy Suckley,
he thought he might break yet another presidential precedent
and retire from office before his fourth term ended.
Meanwhile, he would maintain the strictest secrecy
about his own condition, even from his wife.
I wouldn't discuss
the president's health with him because I hated the idea
and he knew I hated it.
Either he felt he ought to serve a fourth term
and wanted it or he didn't.
That was up to the man himself to decide, and no one else.
May 10, 1944. The White House.
Everyone wanted to greet the president
and see how he looked and felt.
Anna and I held long talks about his "routine, "
and how difficult it is going to be to keep him to it.
Anna had the brilliant thought of suggesting
a nice, cool lunch on the porch,
the lawn looking "green as green."
The president looked across at the Jefferson Memorial
and decided to give instructions for trimming the trees back for the vista.
Daisy Suckley.
Daisy Suckley and the president's daughter Anna,
now living in the White House
with her second husband away at war,
were relieved to see that a month in South Carolina
had cleared up the president's supposed "bronchitis."
He did his best to follow his doctor's regimen
and was pleased to be losing weight
because it would allow him more easily to stand in his braces,
but he remained listless and easily tired.
Despite his frailty and the relentless demands
of the continuing struggle overseas,
Roosevelt had ambitious postwar plans for his country.
In his latest State of the Union message,
he had called for a new "economic bill of rights"
that would guarantee to every American a living wage,
a decent home, a good education, and adequate medical care.
"Unless there is security here at home, " he said,
"there cannot be a lasting peace in the world."
In truth, Roosevelt late in the war.
At a time when one would suppose
that he was only concerned with war strategy,
called for an economic bill of rights more broad-reaching
than anything that the new deal had contemplated before,
and one of the pieces of legislation that's put through
near the end of his presidency is the G.I. Bill of Rights
that will sustain veterans for many years to come.
The G.I. Bill of Rights,
signed by the president after it was passed by Congress
without a single dissenting vote,
would provide almost 8 million returning veterans
with vocational or college educations,
help more than two million more to buy new homes,
and offer other kinds of loans
to launch hundreds of thousands of new businesses.
No other single piece of legislation would do more
to expand the American middle class.
Eleanor applauded her husband's renewed call for reform
and was determined to make sure he did not abandon it,
but she thought he was exaggerating
his medical condition for attention
and complained that by dining alone with Anna and Daisy,
he was cut off from the dissenters
she had always invited to speak their minds to him
over the dinner table.
FDR craved company, but not that kind.
He asked Anna if she would quietly arrange to have
his old love Lucy Rutherfurd come to dinner again.
He began seeing her again
because, I suppose, she was a reminder
of a simpler life when he was able-bodied,
but I think she was a genuinely nice person
who adored him and believed him
and had no causes of her own,
and, like Daisy Suckley, she was there to admire him.
His secretaries knew about it.
Daisy Suckley knew about it, and his daughter,
his daughter Anna, knew about it,
but his wife didn't know about it,
and the other children didn't know about it,
and it just shows you the worlds within worlds of the Roosevelts.
I'm convinced that it's simply
a friendship at this point in time, but think about it.
Lucy must remind him of what it was like
when he was young and healthy, when he could walk and run,
and here, he's deteriorating physically day after day,
and it gives him a lift to remember those old times.
So he decides that he wants to see her.
It will help him to see her, but the only way he can do that,
fearing that Eleanor wouldn't understand,
is to have her come to the White House
when Eleanor is away, and the only person he can trust
to make those scheduling decisions is Anna.
So you can imagine the dilemma that it put Anna in,
being asked by her father if she will make it possible for Lucy to come,
which she does 6 different times during that year,
but knowing how much it would hurt her mother,
but she makes the decision that her father
needs this friendship, this companionship,
in order to keep going, as hard as it would be
for her to be the one that makes that happen.
FDR Jr. Told me that one time,
he came back to the white house and walked in unannounced,
and his father was sitting in a chair upstairs
and a strange woman was massaging his legs,
and he had never seen her before and had no idea who she was,
and Roosevelt simply said, "this is an old friend, "
and they shook hands, and Franklin Jr.
Went off to have dinner or whatever,
and years later, he figured out that that was Mrs. Rutherfurd.
Hyde Park. May 19, 1944.
About 11:30 A.M., the president came,
and suggested we go to top cottage to see the dogwood.
We put a couple of chairs in the sun north of the porch
and just talked quietly about the view, the dogwood,
a little about the coming invasion of Europe.
Next week is the time,
the exact date depending on wind and weather and tide.
How that event hangs over us,
has been hanging over us for months,
and here it is, almost at hand.
The world had waited nearly 30 months
for the allies to launch their invasion
of Nazi-occupied Western Europe.
It began with 5 coordinated landings
along the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944...
D-Day.
His son James called Franklin Roosevelt
a frustrated clergyman.
It's an interesting insight because when you think
about what clergymen do, what do priests do?
All ears are attuned to their voices.
All eyes are on them, and they're acting
in the service of a larger cause.
It's precisely what FDR saw himself doing.
The great climax of this was the D-Day prayer in June of 1944
when, for 100 million Americans
listening on the radio, he read aloud
a prayer of his own composition that he'd written
using the episcopal book of common prayer.
If 100 million Americans listened in,
that was one of the largest moments
of mass prayer in human history.
Almighty God,
our sons, pride of our nation,
this day have set upon a mighty endeavor,
a struggle to preserve our Republic,
our religion, and our civilization
and to set free a suffering humanity.
Lead them straight and true.
Give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts,
steadfastness in their faith.
They will need thy blessings.
Their road will be long and hard,
for the enemy is strong.
He may hurl back our forces.
Success may not come with rushing speed,
but we shall return again and again,
and we know that by thy grace
and by the righteousness of our cause
our sons will triumph.
The American commander who had been assigned
to take Utah Beach on D-Day
was the oldest man in the invasion force...
57-year-old General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. ,
the oldest son of the 26th president of the United States
and the fifth cousin of the 32nd.
Drifting smoke that had obscured the target
and strong currents that drove their landing craft off-course
had brought his men in to shore on Utah Beach
more than 2,000 yards from the spot chosen
by the D-Day planners.
Roosevelt limped badly from arthritis
and his World War I wounds,
but he refused to seek cover.
He had explained to his wife that,
"it steadies the young men to know that I am with them,
plodding along with my cane."
He rallied his men
and took the beachhead in less than an hour,
then accompanied them as they fought their way inland,
despite sporadic chest pains that he kept to himself.
A little over a month later,
he died of a massive heart attack.
"Ted's death did something to me from which I shall not recover, "
Edith Roosevelt told her daughter Ethel.
She had now outlived her husband
and 3 out of 4 of her boys.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Was posthumously awarded
the medal of honor for gallantry and courage at Utah Beach.
It was the same medal his father had once sought for himself
after the battle of San Juan Hill.
Two days after D-Day, Admiral McIntire,
the president's official physician,
issued one of his cheery periodic bulletins.
The president's health, he assured the press,
was "excellent in all respects."
As the Democratic convention approached,
fewer and fewer Democratic insiders believed him,
but it was no time to change leadership.
The allies had not yet begun to fight their way
through the hedgerows that boxed them in
behind the Normandy beaches.
In the Pacific, American forces were months away
from beginning the campaign to retake the Philippines.
No one was willing publicly to admit
that Roosevelt was too ill to survive a fourth term,
but now the choice of a vice presidential candidate
assumed an importance it had never had before.
Conservatives insisted on replacing the Liberal Henry Wallace.
Even some of Wallace's most passionate supporters
found him dreamy, impractical, aloof.
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a column praising him.
The president told her not to publish it
until the convention was over.
He took no public position on who should be his running mate
but this time made no objection to the choice
of the party's more moderate leaders...
senator Harry S. Truman.
Roosevelt was so little interested
that he met privately with Truman just once
so that photographers could take a picture of them together.
Truman noticed that the president's hand
trembled so badly, he couldn't pour cream into his coffee.
Roosevelt never bothered to tell Truman
about the Manhattan Project, the top-secret program
that would one day yield the atomic bomb.
Roosevelt accepted his party's nomination
from his railroad car on a siding in San Diego.
An associated press photographer caught him
looking especially gaunt and slack-jawed.
The picture startled newspaper readers across the country.
The president's press secretary
kicked the photographer off the train,
but a reporter for the "Chicago Tribune"
noticed something else in the uncropped picture...
a uniformed stranger who turned out to be FDR's cardiologist
Lieutenant Commander Howard Bruenn,
assigned to be at Roosevelt's side wherever he went.
Everyone noticed that he'd lost a great deal of weight,
and part of it was his illness,
but part of it was a desire to get back on his feet.
The thinner you are, the easier it is
to stand in braces, and during the war,
he had not made a lot of speeches.
He had not had to stand.
He was exhausted and weary,
and he went to Warm Springs at one point
and was almost pathetically pleased to see
that he could stand in the pool again
and that somehow if he kept the weight off,
he would be able to campaign the way he once had.
On Sunday evening, July 30, 1944,
in Somerville, Massachusetts,
the president's devoted, long-time personal secretary
Missy Lehand was taken to the movies.
She had suffered two serious strokes 3 years earlier
but seemed to be improving.
Then she saw the newsreel of FDR accepting his party's nomination
aboard his railroad car in San Diego.
She hadn't seen him for nearly a year.
He looked like a different man, haggard and sick.
What is the job before us in 1944?
First, to win the war...
to win it fast,
to win it overwhelmingly.
Secondly, to form worldwide international organizations
and to arrange to use the armed forces
of the sovereign nations of the world
to make another world war impossible
within the foreseeable future.
Back home from the theater,
Missy leafed through pictures of them both
when they were young.
That night, she suffered a third stroke
and died the following day.
August 26, 1944.
The war has moved so fast in the last few days,
one can hardly take it in.
Paris has always been a symbol,
and now that it is again a city where Frenchmen are free,
I feel that the whole American nation
must breathe a sigh of relief and hope.
The landing craft,
a wholly new type of ship,
one we didn't dream of two years and a half ago,
came to the beach.
This landing came to the beach
from the transports that were lying off shore...
August 12, 1944.
At 8 P.M., the president spoke on the radio from his cruiser
in the Bremerton Navy yards at Seattle.
The social and economic feature... future.
His voice sounded strong,
but, being on the lookout for anything "wrong, "
it seemed to me as though he was tired
and that he once or twice got mixed up on his words.
This would mean nothing with anyone else,
but we expect perfection from the president,
and any tiny slip of any kind always worries me.
Roosevelt had not stood to speak
since losing so much weight.
His braces no longer fit.
The wind ruffled his speech.
The deck heaved,
and he suffered intense pain in his chest and shoulders...
a sudden, severe attack of angina.
"It scared the hell out of us, " Dr. Bruenn remembered,
but Roosevelt soldiered on.
At Quebec citadel,
there was an air of satisfaction.
The 6-day conference was over.
At the eighth allied conference since 1941,
Roosevelt and Churchill agreed
that once Germany had surrendered,
she should be divided among the victors,
including the Soviet Union.
After a final formal dinner on the evening of September 15,
Roosevelt, Churchill, the Canadian Prime Minister,
and their aides watched a new movie from Hollywood...
"Wilson, " a romanticized life of the president
under whom FDR had served during the Great War.
Toward the end, the exhausted president
refuses to give up his struggle for the league of nations
and a world in which such wars can never happen again.
But you'll kill yourself.
I must go on.
Mr. Tomkin,
will you please tell the newspaper men
that we're returning to Washington immediately?
As FDR watched the film,
he was heard muttering to himself,
"by God, that's not going to happen to me."
His whole left side is paralyzed.
Afterwards,
Bruenn took the president's blood pressure.
It was 240 over 130, dangerously high,
the highest his doctors had yet recorded.
♪ We'll remember in November how you voted in the spring ♪
♪ we're keeping score for '44, and we won't miss a thing ♪
Governor Thomas Dewey of New York,
Roosevelt's Republican opponent in 1944,
struck many, even among his supporters,
as stiff and pompous.
Alice Longworth,
Theodore Roosevelt's oldest daughter,
once compared Dewey
to "the little man on the wedding cake, "
but he was young and vigorous,
in vivid contrast, he said,
to the "old, tired, and quarrelsome men"
of the Roosevelt administration.
Questions about Roosevelt and his health
were being raised everywhere.
"Let's not be squeamish, "
said an editorial in the "New York Sun."
"6 presidents have died in office."
"I don't know how it will turn out, "
Eleanor Roosevelt told a friend.
"If Franklin loses, I'll be personally glad
but worried for the world."
If FDR were to win again,
he had to convince the country he was still up to the job.
Before the International Teamsters Union,
president Roosevelt opens his fight for re-election.
In late September, FDR spoke at a Teamster's dinner
in Washington where everyone had had a lot to drink.
The speech was broadcast all over the country,
and the president made the most of it.
A Republican congressman had charged falsely
on the floor of the house that the president
had wasted taxpayer dollars and risked sailors' lives
by sending a destroyer to pick up his dog.
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 is 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 $2 million or $3 million
or $8 million or $20 million dollars,
his scotch soul was furious.
He has not been the same dog since.
The president made
his first campaign speech on Saturday night.
It was extremely clever, and he never spoke
with more "pep" and humor.
A few speeches like that, and we won't worry
about the results of the election on November 7.
As he launched his formal campaign in New York on October 21,
a cold, steady rain lashed the city.
His doctors protested,
but the president insisted on riding in an open car
for 51 miles through 4 of the 5 boroughs.
Somewhere between 1.5 million and 3 million people
turned out to see if he was all right,
and he had to demonstrate to them that he was.
Now the procession
through the Metropolis in a downpour of rain
which Mr. Roosevelt braves in an open car,
FDR's first outdoor appearance as a campaigning candidate.
He doesn't seem to mind the weather one bit.
New York certainly knows there's a political campaign on.
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 service men
and to down a stiff bourbon.
Watch the car. Watch yourself.
Crowds at Ebbets Baseball Field, Brooklyn,
greet president Roosevelt,
starting his tour of New York City.
Here on behalf of his friend Senator Bob Wagner,
Mr. Roosevelt has a special word for Brooklyn Dodger fans.
We want Roosevelt!
We want Roosevelt!
We want Roosevelt!
We want Roosevelt!
We want Roosevelt!
We want Roosevelt!
Hey!
You know I come from the state of New York,
and I've got to make a terrible confession to you.
I come from the state of New York,
and I practiced law in New York City,
but I have never been in Ebbets Field before.
I've rooted for the Dodgers...
And I hope to come back here some day and see them play.
Thanks ever so much.
The tour of the city took more than 4 hours,
and then Roosevelt went on that evening to deliver
a major address to the foreign policy association.
As election day grew 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.
The first American troops had crossed the Rhine
and ventured onto German soil.
Roosevelt took no chances.
He campaigned through 7 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.
It was the closest of the 4 presidential races he'd run.
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.
On December 16
under a thick cloud of winter mist,
3 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.
He followed the fighting in his map room,
but he did not try to second-guess his commanders.
"In great stress, "
General George Marshall remembered,
"Roosevelt was a strong man."
Then on December 23, the weather cleared.
American planes began bombarding the enemy,
and things began to turn.
It was the costliest battle in Western Europe.
There were 90,000 American casualties.
Two days later, the president gathered
all his family around him at Hyde Park for Christmas.
His sons and his son-in-law were home on leave.
I am thankful for every glimpse,
no matter how short, of any of our own boys
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,
for no one can take joy that is past away from you.
It'll be there in your heart
to live on when the dark days come."
For Roosevelt'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.
The signal came,
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.
You will understand and, I believe, agree
with my wish that the form of this inauguration
be simple and its words brief.
FDR had not attempted to stand in public for 3 months.
His inaugural address was the shortest since George Washington,
less than 5 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!"
As they say, that and that.
Yes, sir.
That's it.
Hoping to solve intricate problems of war and peace,
President Roosevelt reaches the Yalta meeting
accompanied by his daughter Mrs. Anna Boettiger.
These are army signal corps pictures
of an historic world meeting
that will shape the destiny of future generations.
In early February 1945
as American forces gathered for the assault
on Iwo Jima in the Pacific,
the next rung on the ladder that led to Japan,
Roosevelt undertook yet another arduous overseas journey
to the Soviet Union
and the dilapidated czarist palace
near Yalta on the Black Sea
to meet once more with Churchill and Stalin.
Roosevelt's mind was still perfectly clear,
but he was obviously very ill,
startling the Russians and the British.
Eleanor had hoped to attend,
but FDR had taken Anna with him instead.
She tried her best to keep him from too much exertion.
"I found out through Dr. Bruenn 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 hell of a lot anyone can do about it."
Churchill was tired, too,
and the stakes could not have been higher.
Churchill saw, in his tragic world view, that the Soviets
were going to be more of a threat than Roosevelt
at least wanted to think at that moment.
There's a myth of Yalta that Roosevelt got it wrong
and Churchill got it right,
but it's much more complicated than that.
Roosevelt was always
a practical politician.
Roosevelt never believed in making the first move.
He didn't make the first move with Hitler.
He didn't make the first move with Stalin.
He let his opponents commit themselves and then he struck,
and I think that that would have been his reaction
to what became the cold war.
The Soviet premier was triumphant.
His armies had overrun Romania, Bulgaria,
Hungary, Poland, and East Prussia
and were closing in on Berlin itself,
and he saw no reason to let go of the eastern
and central European nations his armies had taken
from the Germans at such a fearful cost.
The Americans and British had neither the resolve
nor the capability to change his mind.
Stalin agreed to join a postwar united nations
provided the USSR 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,
and he pledged, to Roosevelt's great relief,
to enter the ongoing struggle against Japan.
At the time, this seemed necessary.
Roosevelt didn't know... nobody knew...
that the atomic bomb would work.
Roosevelt also understood that Soviet domination of Poland
was, at this point, a fait accompli,
that the only way to get the Soviets out of Poland
was to march into Poland with American soldiers.
He knew perfectly well that there was no support
in the United States for that.
It's a sign of the enormous tension
and the conflicting forces that were at play
in the highest levels of the alliance.
Roosevelt always believed that he could end up
in the end managing those to the good.
He just ran out of time in 1945.
Maybe he could have,
but Warm Springs intervened.
Roosevelt was weak and weary
when he returned from Yalta, so weak and weary
that, for the first time in his political life,
he made 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 10 pounds of steel around
on the bottom of my legs and also because of the fact
that I have just completed a 14,000-mile trip.
I come from the Crimea Conference
with a firm belief that we have made a good start
on the road to a world of peace.
Never before have the major allies been more closely united,
and they're determined to continue to be united,
to be united with each other and with all peace-loving nations
so that the ideal of lasting peace will become a reality.
We haven't won the wars yet.
It's a long, tough road to Tokyo.
Roosevelt still had big plans.
He told Eleanor he wanted her to accompany him soon
to Britain, Holland, France,
and he hoped someday to travel to the Middle East
and show the people there how to make their desert bloom,
but first, he told Daisy in private,
he wanted to return to Warm Springs
and "sleep and sleep and sleep."
Warm Springs. March 30.
A crowd was waiting at the station, as always.
We drove slowly past the front of Georgia Hall,
where a large group of patients were collected to clap and wave
and from there on up to the little White House.
Dear Franklin, he is completely "let down, "
which means that he is relaxed and able to rest.
Later, the stationmaster
at Warm Springs would remember that the president
had been "the worst-looking man I ever saw who was still alive."
"The boss is slipping away from us, "
one of the president's secretaries
told Dr. Bruenn that evening,
"and no earthly power can save him."
Bruenn agreed his patient was "precarious"
but still hoped rest might restore him
as it had so many times before.
For 10 days, with Daisy Suckley
and his cousin Laura Delano caring for him,
he did his best to rest,
but the president of the Philippines
stopped in for lunch.
There were cables back and forth between him and Churchill
over how to deal with the Soviets,
and when the first lady called one evening
urging him to intervene personally to get arms
to a particular band of Yugoslav partisans,
she would not take no for an answer.
When the president finally put the phone down after 45 minutes,
his blood pressure had risen 50 points.
On April 9, Lucy Rutherfurd joined FDR at Warm Springs,
bringing with her a painter named Elizabeth Shoumatoff
whom she had asked to paint the president's portrait.
April 10.
The lunch party was awfully nice.
Everybody was cheerful and responsive,
and Franklin told stories to his heart's content until 4 P.M.
He went off to rest, came out at 5:00
looking more tired than ever, and went out for a drive.
He took Lucy and Fala with him to Dowdell's knob.
They sat in the setting sun for over an hour,
the best thing he could do.
On April 12, 1945,
Eleanor Roosevelt held her usual press conference
at the White House.
She laid out her crowded schedule for the next few days,
beginning with the annual thrift-shop tea
that afternoon at the Sulgrave club,
dinner with the American friends committee,
a tea for New York Democrats,
a visit to a handicapped children's clinic,
and then she would join her husband
for the San Francisco conference
that was to form the united nations.
Nothing had so deeply interested her
since the early days of the new deal, she said.
In Georgia, working over the final draft of a speech
in the warm southern sun, FDR had been thinking
about his hopes for the postwar world, as well.
I remember saying
once upon a time in the long, long ago when I was a freshman,
that the only thing our people had to fear was fear itself.
We were in fear then of economic collapse.
We struck back boldly against that fear, and we overcame it.
The work now, my friends, is peace...
more than an end to this war,
an end to the beginnings of all wars,
and to all Americans who dedicate themselves with us
to the making of an abiding peace, I say,
the only limit to our realization of tomorrow
will be our doubts of today.
Let us move forward with strong and active faith.
Late that morning, when the president
was wheeled into the living room of his cottage,
Daisy thought he looked better than he had in days.
So did Lucy Rutherfurd and Laura Delano
and Madame Shoumatoff,
who continued to work on his portrait.
He stopped reading his mail to eat a little
of the sweetened oatmeal his doctors thought
might help improve his appetite,
then returned to reading his mail.
It was about 1:45.
Lunch was to be served in 15 minutes.
Daisy looked up from her crocheting.
Franklin seemed
to be looking for something,
his head forward, his hands fumbling.
I went forward and looked into his face.
"Have you dropped your cigarette?"
He looked at me with his forehead furrowed in pain
and tried to smile.
He put his left hand up to the back of his head and said,
"I have a terrific pain in the back of my head."
Roosevelt lost consciousness.
He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.
The president was carried into his bedroom.
Daisy called for the doctor.
There was nothing anyone could do.
Lucy Rutherfurd drove away with Madame Shoumatoff
as quickly as she could.
3:35 P.M.
Franklin D. Roosevelt,
the hope of the world,
is dead.
What this means to all who knew him personally
is impossible to put into words.
What it means to the world, only the future can tell.
He was just 63 years old.
Eleanor was listening to a pianist play
at the thrift-shop tea at the Sulgrave Club.
Before she left the White House,
Laura Delano had called from Georgia
to tell her the president had "fainted, "
but admiral McIntire had urged her to go on with her schedule
as if nothing had happened for fear of alarming anyone.
She happened to be sitting at the tea
next to the widow of Woodrow Wilson.
Then the mistress of ceremonies
whispered that she had a telephone call.
The president's press secretary Steve Early
asked her to come home immediately.
"I did not even ask why, " she remembered.
"I knew down in my heart
that something dreadful had happened."
Early and Admiral McIntire told her
that the president had slipped away.
Vice President Truman arrived at 5:00,
not sure why he'd been summoned.
"Harry, " Eleanor told him,
"the president is dead."
After a moment, he asked
if there was anything he could do for her.
"No, " she said.
"Is there anything we can do for you?
For you're the one in trouble now."
We interrupt this program to bring you
a special news bulletin from CBS World News.
A press association has just announced
that President Roosevelt is dead.
The president died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
All we know so far is that the president died
at Warm Springs in Georgia.
On April 12, 1945,
I had a date with a young woman in Greenwich Village,
and I walked into her apartment, and the radio was blaring,
and I listened to it, and she said to me
when I was listening on the radio,
"Franklin Roosevelt has died, "
and I was dumbstruck, and then I said,
"oh, my God, Harry Truman is president of the United States, "
and it seemed inconceivable that anybody
but Franklin Roosevelt could be president...
And I wandered around the city hardly knowing what I was doing
or felt, and I thought, "my father has died, "
and the notion that Franklin Roosevelt
was father to the American people,
even would call himself papa,
it really was true,
and there was this extraordinary sense of loss,
of not knowing how we were gonna go on...
and that feeling was widespread in the country,
an enormous sense of mourning,
of feeling that they had been in the presence of greatness
and it was now taken away from them,
that they were on their own.
Eleanor wrote out a cable
to be sent to her 4 sons overseas...
"he did his job as he would want you to do, " it said.
Then she left for Warm Springs.
She arrived shortly before midnight.
She asked exactly what had happened.
Franklin's cousin Laura Delano told Eleanor
that Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd
had been with her husband when he collapsed
and furthermore that she and Franklin
had seen one another several times over the last few years
and that her daughter Anna
had sometimes helped arrange those visits.
Eleanor said nothing.
I can't even imagine what it must have been like
for Eleanor to absorb that her husband had just died
and to absorb what must have felt like a terrible betrayal.
She said when she went on the train
with her husband's body back to Washington,
she felt like she wasn't even herself.
She looked out at the people outside,
but some part of her was just not there.
She accompanied her husband's body home
from Warm Springs, where the hearse passed slowly
by his fellow polios so that they could say good-bye.
Thousands wept along the tracks
as his funeral train made its way to Washington...
He'd been the president for 12 years,
and the word "president" meant Roosevelt,
and suddenly to have him gone with the war not over
had an enormous impact on people.
No one alive then can't tell you where they were
and how they felt and what people said.
When the funeral procession is passing,
there's a story told about a man who falls to his knees in grief.
Another man standing next to him helps him to his feet
and says, "did you know the president?"
And the first man says, "no, but he knew me."
And then on to Hyde Park,
where he was to be buried in his mother's rose garden.
Eleanor felt sorrow
for the grieving Americans she saw along the way,
she remembered, but her own feelings
remained "almost impersonal, " perhaps because
"much further back, I had had to face certain difficulties
until I decided to accept the fact
that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is,
and you cannot live at all if you do not learn
to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be."
Poor E.R.
I believe she loved him more deeply than she knows herself,
and his feeling for her was deep and lasting.
The fact that they could not relax together or play together
is the tragedy of their joint lives,
for I believe,
from everything that I have seen of them,
that they had everything else in common.
It was a matter of personalities.
I cannot blame either of them.
Daisy Suckley.
All human beings have failings.
All human beings have needs and temptations and stresses.
Men and women who live together through long years
get to know one another's failings,
but they also come to know what is worthy of respect
and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.
If at the end, one can say, "this man used to the limit
the powers that God granted him.
He was worthy of love and respect
and of the sacrifice many people made
in order that he might achieve what he deemed to be his task, "
then that life has been lived well
and there are no regrets.
It was late.
Churchill said, "I felt as if I was struck
with the force of a physical blow, "
when the word comes,
and he ultimately gave a very powerful eulogy
in the house of commons, saying that,
"Franklin Roosevelt was the greatest friend of freedom
Britain or the world has ever known."
Stalin was "distressed" at the news
and worried that someone had poisoned the president.
Huddled in his bunker in Berlin, Hitler exulted.
"See? The war is not lost, " he told an aide.
He would be dead in 18 days.
The war in Europe ended a week after that.
Hitler's 1,000-year Reich had lasted just 12 years.
Theodore Roosevelt's widow Edith was shocked
at the news of FDR's death
and wired "love and sympathy" to Eleanor.
The war years had mellowed her view
of her late husband's cousin.
He was "a nice man, " she said, and had turned out to be
as Conservative as Alexander Hamilton
and as Democratic as Theodore Roosevelt's hero
Abraham Lincoln.
Without question, if tr died at the end of his life
feeling a sense of frustration and unrealized ambition
and knowing that the ideas that he had hoped to put into place,
the progressive era, had not gone into place under him,
FDR could die at the end of his life knowing
that almost everything he had wanted to accomplish
he had accomplished,
and he would loom as the far larger figure,
even though he stood in TR's shadow when he was a young man.
Roosevelt said in his last inaugural
that "our constitution is not perfect yet.
Nothing is perfect yet, but we have to press on, "
and what Roosevelt made possible
was a kind of Democratic vigor
to go forth from new deal America,
World War II America, around the world,
and we weren't always right.
We committed enormous sins.
He was wrong about Japanese internment.
He was too slow on civil rights,
but he kept a process going
that Washington kept going and Jefferson kept going
and Jackson and Lincoln and tr and FDR.
They kept alive the possibility of progress,
and they did it despite their shortcomings.
They overcame their flaws,
and I think that's really what great leadership is.
It's transcending the natural limitations
with which we're all born
and managing to change the history of the world
just a little bit for the good,
and in Franklin Roosevelt's case,
he changed it quite a bit for the good.
Every Democratic president since 1945
has lived in the shadow of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Harry Truman was constantly being measured by FDR.
His success in that remarkable election in 1948
was largely due to his ability to keep the FDR coalition going.
John F. Kennedy used the CCC
as the basis for the Peace Corps.
Lyndon Johnson said, "FDR was a daddy to me always, "
and much of the war on poverty in the great society
derives from the new deal.
Jimmy Carter, instead of opening his campaign in Detroit
as Democratic candidates usually did,
chose instead Warm Springs, Georgia.
Bill Clinton said that his grandfather thought
that when he died, he was gonna go to Roosevelt
rather than to heaven,
and Barack Obama, even before he took office,
again and again alluded to the experience
of Roosevelt and the new deal.
The White House. April 19, 1945.
Hick dearest,
the Trumans have just been to lunch,
and nearly all that I can do is done.
The upstairs looks desolate,
and I'll be glad to leave tomorrow.
It is empty and without purpose to be here now.
Franklin's death ended a period in history,
and now in its wake for lots of us who lived in his shadow,
we have to start again under our own momentum
and wonder what we can achieve.
Much love, dear.
E.R.
A few days later, Eleanor Roosevelt emerged
from her New York apartment on Washington Square
to find a newspaperwoman waiting on the sidewalk.
"The story is over, " she said gently and hurried on,
but it was not over.
Eleanor Roosevelt is a sort of miracle
of the human spirit, I think.
There are so many times in her life
when you would think she would have given up...
when she was a little girl,
when she was betrayed during World War I,
then this awful betrayal at the end...
and somehow, she continued doing her work.
She lived to meet the needs of others.
She explained that early on, and she never abandoned it,
that the way to be loved
was to do things for people, to help them,
and I think that's what she always relied on
to go on, and she went on.
The atomic bomb ended the war in the Pacific.
FDR had given the go-ahead to build it
because he feared the Nazis would build one first,
and Mrs. Roosevelt had no quarrel
with President Truman's decision to use it,
but she understood that when the bomb fell,
a new world had been born,
"a world, " she wrote, "in which we have to learn
to live in friendship with our neighbors
of every race, creed, or color
or do away with civilization."
Arrangements are now being made for the formal signing
of the surrender terms at the earliest possible moment.
Newsmen rush the president's report
to a waiting world, and through the early evening
Tuesday, August 14, the fateful news is flashed.
In New York City, as throughout a rejoicing nation and world,
vast throngs of grateful, happy people
celebrate the end of fighting, the dawn of peace.
Two million New Yorkers jam Times Square.
It's official. It's all over. It's total victory.
The world remembered Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
commander-in-chief, American war casualty.
Years of brave responsibility took their toll.
A grateful world honors him today.
In late 1945,
President Truman asked Eleanor Roosevelt
to be a delegate to the first meeting
of the united nations general assembly in London.
Before disembarking, she held a press conference.
"For the first time in my life, " she told reporters,
"I can say just what I want.
For your information, it is wonderful to feel free."
Then she asked that those words be kept off the record.
Her fellow delegates included two Republicans
who had actively opposed her husband's foreign policy...
Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg
and the veteran diplomat John Foster Dulles.
Both thought her a naive do-gooder
appointed purely for political and sentimental reasons.
She didn't think much of them, either.
Vandenberg was "hard to get along with" and secretive,
she told an old friend,
and, "J. Foster Dulles I like not at all."
She astonished them both.
Perhaps a million displaced persons from Eastern Europe
refused to return to territories now under Russian rule.
Mrs. Roosevelt's committee agreed
they should be given the right of asylum.
Andrei Vishinsky, who had been the merciless Soviet prosecutor
during the purge trials of the 1930s,
demanded their immediate, forced return,
equating giving in to their demands to appeasing Hitler.
Mrs. Roosevelt was asked to respond.
"The united nations was created to safeguard
the rights of individual human beings, " she said,
"not the prerogatives of governments.
Refugees should be allowed to live where they liked."
It is my ruling
as chairman of the commission that the point raised
by the Soviet member is out of order.
The Soviet member or anyone else on the commission
may, of course, appeal against this ruling.
The Russians lost the vote.
Mrs. Roosevelt won the admiration of her colleagues.
Senator Vandenberg told the press
her performance had made him want
to "take back everything I ever said about her,
and, believe me, it's been plenty."
She was unanimously elected chair of a committee
to draw up a universal declaration of human rights,
history's first attempt at laying out the principles
under which all nations should behave toward their own citizens
as well as toward one another.
It would not be easy.
Her committee included
Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists,
the representatives of democracies and dictatorships,
colonial powers and once-colonized peoples,
and she had to deal with a state department
constantly worried she would promise too much.
She was as tough as she was tactful
and drove her fellow delegates so hard
that one felt called upon to remind her
that they had human rights, too.
If they wanted shorter days,
Theodore Roosevelt's favorite niece answered,
they should make shorter speeches.
Thanks largely to what one admirer called
her distinctive blend of "naivete" and "cunning, "
they fell into line one by one.
This universal declaration of human rights
may well become the international Magna Carta
of all men everywhere.
Man must have freedom in which to develop his full stature
and through common effort
to raise the level of human dignity.
New Zealand? Yes.
United Kingdom? Yes.
At 3:00 in the morning on December 10, 1948,
the declaration was adopted
without a single dissenting vote.
Afterwards, the entire general assembly
did something it had never done before
and has never done since.
It rose to give a standing ovation
to a single delegate.
All her life, Eleanor Roosevelt said,
she'd wanted to "take on a job
and see it through to a conclusion."
She had done it, and she had triumphed.
She was characteristically modest about her achievement.
The declaration was not self-enforcing.
The challenge, she said, was one of "actually living and working
in our countries in freedom and justice for each human being."
Mrs. Roosevelt had a very fast walk.
In fact, her walk was just not fast.
It was purposeful,
somewhat like her Uncle Theodore,
and she was stopped by people who would say
the most poignant things to her...
"you saved my family."
"During world war ii, you reunited us"...
and she would say, "thank you very much, "
and want to push on,
and I would think perhaps she hadn't heard them,
but that wasn't the reason she didn't stop.
She was no longer interested in what had been accomplished.
Her interest was in all the things in the world
that remained to be done.
She seemed to be everywhere,
taking note of everything,
asking what she could do to help.
The colonial era was coming to an end.
The west needed to find new ways to relate
to the newly liberated peoples emerging from it.
And Mrs. Roosevelt said about India,
"it's like Mount Everest.
You think you can never get to the top of these problems,
but like climbing mount Everest, you take a first step."
She took time out to fulfill a lifelong dream...
sitting in the moonlight and gazing at the Taj Mahal,
just as her father had promised her
he would do with her one day.
She was an early and effective advocate for Israel.
In the Soviet Union, she debated with premier Nikita khrushchev,
and when she went to see Lenin's tomb in red square,
she insisted on standing in line
along with hundreds of ordinary Soviet citizens.
Throughout her public life,
Eleanor Roosevelt had always had a small circle of friends
in whom she could confide her private thoughts and feelings...
Nancy cook and Marion Dickerman,
Earl Miller, Lorena Hickock, Joseph lash.
Now a new friend was often at her side...
a New York physician, an expert on polio,
18 years younger than she... named David Gurewitsch.
When the president died,
David got a call in his office, and it was Mrs. Roosevelt,
and she said, "I've moved back to New York now,
"and I shall need a doctor in New York.
Are you willing to be my doctor?"
And he wrote in a note, he said, "I agreed, "
and then she said,
"I promise not to bother you too much, "
and that was the beginning.
More letters would follow, hundreds of them.
Dr. Gurewitsch became her confidant and constant companion
as well as her doctor.
Her friend Esther Lape, who had known her
since her first forays into reform,
believed he was "dearer to her than anyone else in the world."
"I love you, " she once told him,
"as I love and have never loved anyone else."
Mrs. Roosevelt found in him a person
she could trust, and that was a wonderful thing for her,
and she found in David someone, basically, who took care of her,
who was loyal to her,
and had a lively interest in her work.
When Dr. Gurewitsch became engaged to Edna Perkel,
it took both women a little time to adjust.
All I knew was
that they were very close friends
because the first time I had dinner was a shock to me.
The 3 of us alone at dinner,
that's when I knew that this was a very close friendship.
She was uneasy, quite uneasy
about how the 3 of us would be together,
and, indeed, in a letter she wrote to him,
she said that I was a nice person,
and she said, "I fully expected our relationship to change, "
but, in fact, it was reinforced,
and she made it her business that this was going to work
because she wanted to keep David close.
She told me that she loved me.
Mrs. Roosevelt and the Gurewitsches
eventually bought a house together on East 74th Street,
just 9 blocks from the twin brownstones
Sara Delano Roosevelt had built for herself, Eleanor,
and Franklin more than half a century before.
Mrs. Roosevelt never had dinner alone
if she could help it because she was,
as David said, "a chronically lonely person."
She really never had dinner alone.
Mrs. Roosevelt came upstairs.
She marched into the kitchen and said, "may I help you, dear?"
And my heart sank because Mrs. Roosevelt
had no clue about what happens in a kitchen.
So I thought she could do the least harm
if I asked her to wash the lettuce,
and so she stood beside me at the sink,
and she was washing lettuce, and I said after a few moments,
"would you excuse me, Mrs. Roosevelt?"
I went in to my husband, and I said to David,
"find an excuse to get her out of the kitchen
because we're standing in water up to our ankles, "
and she never helped me in the kitchen again.
Eleanor Roosevelt
had been her husband's Liberal conscience,
always urging him to do what she saw as the right thing.
During her last years, she served her country
and her party in the same role.
Over the next decade,
she continued her work on behalf of civil rights,
championing integration of the armed forces,
applauding the integration of the schools,
publicizing instances of discrimination,
supporting the freedom riders,
and ignoring the death threats
that never stopped coming her way.
Eleanor Roosevelt.
At a national convention of the NAACP,
she interviewed the first black student
to integrate the University of Alabama...
Autherine Lucy.
Now, you must have felt all alone in this situation.
Were you very much afraid?
I have to admit that, yes, I was afraid,
but it is my policy
that in any situation which calls for courage,
we cannot give in to our fear.
We must overpower our fear,
and that is what I did in this respect.
In 1949,
Mrs. Roosevelt had found herself in conflict
with Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York.
She backed a bill on constitutional grounds
that barred parochial schools from receiving
direct aid from the federal government.
The cardinal denounced her as anti-catholic
and went on to accuse her of actions
"unworthy of an American mother."
Her friends were furious.
She remained cool in her response.
"The final judgment, my dear cardinal,
of the worthiness of all human beings
is in the hands of God."
In the end, it was the cardinal
who had to call upon her at val-kill to make his peace.
And even if there were
only one communist in the State Department,
even if there were only one communist
in the State Department, that would still be one communist too many.
Eleanor called McCarthy "our gestapo."
She was just horrified by the silence
of some of her former allies
and by so many people naming names.
She thought it was a really disgusting moment in political life.
"The day I'm afraid to sit down
with people I do not know, " she said,
"because 5 years from now, someone will say
5 of those people were communists
and, therefore, I am a communist,
that will be a sad day."
She had sad days of her own,
most often connected with her troubled children
whose continuing problems she was unable to solve.
Sometimes, she confided to David Gurewitsch,
they brought her close to suicide.
Eleanor Roosevelt suffered from exactly the same kind
of depression that her uncle Theodore did,
and she, too, in order to stay sane, had to stay active.
All her life, she could not stop doing.
Even as an old lady,
she would sit up till 3:00 in the morning
answering letters from perfect strangers.
She needed to be needed.
There was no question about that
because at the end when she didn't want to live,
the reason she didn't want to live was fundamentally
that she felt she could not be useful anymore.
She used to tell me, people are given obstacles
in life to grow strong on, and once, I said to her,
"Mrs. Roosevelt, not everybody grows strong on obstacles.
Some people just fall down, "
and she said very determinedly,
"you're not supposed to fall down.
You must keep standing and walking."
Her work was always her salvation.
When she was asked a political question
she didn't want to answer,
she liked to say, "I know nothing of politics."
In fact, she could be as politically shrewd
and as unforgiving as her old friend
and political mentor Louis Howe had been.
In 1954, her son Franklin
was denied the Democratic nomination
for governor of New York
by the boss of Tammany Hall Carmine Desapio.
She vowed to get even.
In order to get ahead more than 40 years earlier,
her husband had made peace with the Tammany boss of his time.
This time, his widow had other ideas.
She helped establish a reform organization
to combat boss rule,
campaigned from the roofs of sound trucks in the summer heat,
and eventually ended the career of the man
who double-crossed her son.
"I said I'd get him, " she told a friend on election night,
"and I got him."
In 1956, she helped the worldly,
well-traveled governor of Illinois Adlai Stevenson
win the Democratic presidential nomination for the second time.
It is a foolish thing to say that you pledge yourself
to live up to the traditions
of the new deal and the fair deal.
Of course you are proud of those traditions.
Of course you are proud to have the advice
of the elders in our party,
but our party is young and vigorous.
Our party may be the oldest Democratic Party,
but our party...
our party must live
as a young party,
and it must have young leadership.
It was imperative that the Democrats return to power,
she said, "but they must come back with the right leaders."
For her, even though Dwight eisenhower
had already beaten Stevenson once back in 1952,
he was that leader, and during the campaign that followed,
she offered him practical advice on how to reach the voters.
Get to know more ordinary people, she told him.
Speak as if you're talking to one person.
Every speech need not be the Gettysburg Address.
Eisenhower crushed Stevenson again,
but 4 years later, she was still for him
and against the front-runner...
Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.
She thought Kennedy too inexperienced,
too willing to cut corners, too close to his father Joseph,
whose pre-war defeatism she had not forgotten,
and she said all of this and more on television.
When Kennedy complained she was being unfair,
she wired him right back.
"My dear boy, " she wrote.
"I only say these things for your own good.
I have found in a lifetime of adversity
that when blows are rained on one,
it is advisable to turn the other profile."
Stevenson proved a tentative candidate,
but Mrs. Roosevelt went to the convention
in Los Angeles on his behalf, anyway,
hoping somehow to stop the Kennedy bandwagon.
When the delegates spotted her entering the hall,
they stood and cheered for 7 minutes.
She pretended not to notice for as long as she could
because, she said, it would have been impolite
to the speaker to acknowledge the applause,
and she later wrote him a letter of apology.
In the end, despite her efforts,
Kennedy was nominated on the first ballot.
He was young and vigorous,
just the kind of politician she had said she hoped
the Democratic Party would put forward.
A few weeks later,
the nominee arranged to call upon Mrs. Roosevelt at val-kill,
hoping for her political blessing.
The day before he was to appear,
one of her granddaughters fell from a horse and was killed.
Kennedy offered to cancel the meeting.
She said to come ahead.
She understood how difficult it was
to alter a campaign schedule.
Kennedy left their lunch
"absolutely smitten by this woman, " a friend remembered.
"I liked him better than I ever had before, "
Mrs. Roosevelt told a friend afterward.
On election night,
she watched the returns at her New York home.
- I - purposely sat next to her
the night of the Kennedy-Nixon election,
and the door downstairs was open.
People came pouring in, and every time
some community somewhere would go Democratic,
people would applaud in the room.
She never applauded.
She said, "why are they applauding?
What do they expect? It is a Democratic stronghold."
She was glad Kennedy won.
She thought his mind was "open to new ideas, " she wrote,
but she did not hesitate to urge him on to greater efforts
on behalf of peace, progress for women,
and equal rights for all Americans,
just as she had urged her husband on,
and when she thought him wrong,
she did not hesitate to criticize him, either.
That, too, was what she had always done.
Courage is more exhilarating than fear,
and in the long run, it is easier.
We do not have to become heroes overnight,
just a step at a time, meeting each thing as it comes,
seeing it's not as dreadful as it appeared,
discovering we have the strength to stare it down.
On Mrs. Roosevelt's 77th birthday in 1961,
someone asked her if she shouldn't slow down.
"I suppose I should, " she said,
but "I think I have a good deal of my uncle Theodore in me,
because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place
in a corner by the fireside and simply look on."
Would I loved to have imagined Eleanor
knowing at the end of her life what figure she had become
and being able to say to Theodore Roosevelt,
"you believed in me, and look what I've become."
But she was beginning to slow down.
In July of 1962, she was hospitalized for a time
with intermittent fever and infections.
David Gurewitsch diagnosed aplastic anemia,
a rare condition in which the body
fails to produce enough new blood cells.
That summer, she, David, Edna, and Maureen Corr,
Mrs. Roosevelt's last secretary, made a trip to Campobello,
the island where she had the first home
she considered truly her own,
where Franklin had taught his children to sail,
but it was also the place where, during the Great War,
she had suffered over his relationship with Lucy Mercer
and where she had watched as infantile paralysis
seemed certain to end his political career.
She was too frail to walk very far,
but her friends helped her make it
to her favorite picnic spot.
She loved the island in the daytime, she said,
but after dark, the memories flooded back.
"The night, " she said, "has a thousand eyes."
She was hospitalized again when they got back to the city,
grew steadily worse
despite everything the doctors tried to do.
David had said to her,
"we're still trying to save you.
We think we can save you."
And she said to him, "David, I want to die, "
because a life, for her, without being useful
was a life which would have been pointless.
She insisted on being taken home to her apartment
and worried after she got there
that she'd failed to be sufficiently grateful
to the men who'd carried her stretcher.
Eleanor Roosevelt died in her own bedroom
on November 7, 1962.
She was 78 years old.
The funeral was to be held in Hyde Park.
David Gurewitsch would accompany her casket up the Hudson River.
And when he came upstairs to tell me
he was gonna leave now with Mrs. Roosevelt,
I looked out of the window,
and I thought, of course, the first thought,
that this is his last trip with Mrs. Roosevelt...
And...
When the hearse got to the traffic light on the corner
and stopped for the red light,
I was amazed because I couldn't believe
the traffic lights were still working.
President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy,
Vice President Lyndon Johnson,
former presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower
all watched alongside her children,
her friends, and her neighbors
as she was buried next to her husband
in the heart of her mother-in-law's rose garden,
just as he had wished her to be.
It had rained all morning.
When we reached the gravesite,
we all gathered around,
and suddenly, it stopped raining.
Suddenly, there was a burst of sunshine.
All of us looked at each other and smiled
because we knew why that happened,
and it stopped raining,
and just at the close of the service,
it began to rain again, and we all said the same thing...
the great organizer.
Mrs. Roosevelt was the great organizer.
I don't know whether I believe in a future life.
I believe that all that you go through here
must have some value.
Therefore, there must be some reason.
There is a future... that I'm sure of...
but how, that I don't know.
I think I am pretty much of a fatalist.
You have to accept whatever comes,
and the only important thing is that you meet it
with courage and with the best that you have to give.
Perhaps great leaders
do indeed have to come through adversity,
to come through trials of fire to become stronger
than they would be without it,
and you think about each one of these 3 people...
Theodore Roosevelt not only conquering
the asthma that he had as a child,
but having to deal with the death of his wife
and his mother on the same day
and yet somehow conquering those demons by activity
and becoming Theodore Roosevelt;
Eleanor Roosevelt having to conquer that terrible childhood
where her mother looked at her as an ugly girl,
where her father was an alcoholic,
and when she had to become a strong,
independent person on her own;
FDR having to conquer the adversity of the polio
which took away his power to walk
from the time he was 39 years old...
and yet they all emerged stronger
as a result of these trials of fire.
Ernest Hemingway once said, "everyone is broken by life,
but afterward, many are strong in the broken places."
One hot August afternoon back in 1939,
the White House press corps
crowded into FDR's tiny office at Springwood.
The war was still weeks away, and there wasn't much news.
The sheikh of Bahrain was coming for a visit.
The president was glad the supreme court
had seemed more reasonable lately.
The opposition in Congress
was being shortsighted about defense.
Eleanor Roosevelt happened to be there, too,
and she and Franklin began to reminisce about visits
with Theodore Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill
each had made when they were children.
When they went swimming, Eleanor remembered,
Uncle Ted always insisted all the children
run down the dune to Oyster Bay.
"It was awfully steep, " FDR said.
"The sand went down with you, and you were darned lucky
if you didn't end up halfway down
going head over heels."
"And climbing back up, " Eleanor recalled,
"you slipped down one step for every two you took,
but you kept at it,
and eventually, the fear was worn away."
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