Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (163 page)

Yet those who saw him daily wondered how long he had left. He appeared “very tired,” in Churchill’s estimate. “The President seemed placid and frail. I felt that he had a slender contact with life.” The most widely circulated photograph from the Crimean conference showed him sitting almost ghostlike between the full-cheeked Churchill and the ruddy Stalin.

The sea journey home allowed time for rest. Roosevelt spent an hour or two on deck every day and enjoyed his contact with the officers and men. The surprise casualty of the voyage was Pa Watson, who died suddenly of a stroke. Watson had been at Roosevelt’s right hand for years, and his passing was a blow. “Franklin feels his death very much,” Daisy Suckley observed, after he reached America.

H
E MAY HAVE
felt his own death approaching. On his arrival in Washington, Roosevelt threw himself into preparing his report to Congress. He worked a full schedule during the day and often into the night. His appetite failed again, as he complained once more of not being able to taste his food. He lost additional weight and grew more haggard.

His appearance before Congress occasioned further concern. For the first time he addressed the legislators from his wheelchair, for the first time spoke of his disability, and for the first time acknowledged fatigue. “I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say,” he began. “But I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.” He looked around the chamber almost wistfully. “It is good to be home. It has been a long journey.”

He conceded feeling under the weather. But warming to his audience, he turned his illness into a joke. “I was well the entire time. I was not ill for a second, until I arrived back in Washington, and there I heard all of the rumors which had occurred in my absence.”

He let the chuckles subside before turning to the heart of his message. There were two main goals of the Yalta conference, he said. The first was to arrange the defeat of Germany as quickly as possible. The second was to ensure the international cooperation that would render the postwar settlement secure and lasting. Toward both goals, he was pleased to say, the conference had made important progress. “Never before have the major Allies been more closely united, not only in their war aims but also in their peace aims. And they are determined to continue to be united with each other, and with all peace-loving nations, so that the ideal of lasting peace will become a reality.”

Roosevelt said nothing about the Soviet commitment to enter the Pacific war. Indeed, to avoid tipping off the Japanese, the president prevaricated. “This conference concerned itself only with the European war and with the political problems of Europe, and not with the Pacific war,” he asserted. And he painted the Polish question in brighter colors than he knew it deserved. The Yalta promise of free elections in Poland was an “outstanding example of joint action by the three major Allied powers,” he said.

Perhaps he sensed he wouldn’t be addressing the legislators again. Perhaps he simply wanted to reiterate the point he had been making since 1937—the lesson he had learned after the last war. He departed from his text to talk from the heart.

The conference in the Crimea was a turning point, I hope, in our history and therefore in the history of the world. There will soon be presented to the Senate of the United States and to the American people a great decision that will determine the fate of the United States and of the world for generations to come. There can be no middle ground here. We shall have to take the responsibility for world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict….

For the second time in the lives of most of us, this generation is face to face with the objective of preventing wars. To meet that objective, the nations of the world will either have a plan or they will not. The groundwork of a plan has now been furnished, and has been submitted to humanity for discussion and decision. No plan is perfect. Whatever is adopted at San Francisco will doubtless have to be amended time and again over the years, just as our own Constitution has been. No one can say exactly how long any plan will last. Peace can endure only so long as humanity really insists upon it, and is willing to work for it—and sacrifice for it.

Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed them then. We cannot fail them again.

U
NUSUALLY FOR
a Roosevelt speech, his address to Congress read better than it sounded. He hesitated in his presentation and appeared to struggle at times for words. “I did not think it a particularly good speech,” the faithful William Hassett conceded. “The President ad-libbed at length—a wretched practice that weakens even a better effort.” But Howard Bruenn accepted Roosevelt’s explanation that, after departing from his prepared text to lend a personal tone to his comments, he had lost his place coming back.

Yet the symptoms of decline persisted. His color was worse than ever, and he was constantly tired. He agreed to follow Bruenn’s advice to go to Warm Springs and rest there as long as necessary for his condition to improve.

William Hassett had watched Roosevelt closely for months. “Tonight had another talk with Howard Bruenn about the President’s health,” he recorded on March 30.

I said: “He is slipping away from us, and no earthly power can keep him here.”

Bruenn demurred. “Why do you think so?” he asked.

Told him I understood his position—his obligation to save life, not to admit defeat. Then I reminded him that I gave him the same warning when we were here in December. He remembered. I said: “I know you don’t want to make the admission, and I have talked this way with no one else save one. To all the staff, to the family, and with the Boss himself I have maintained the bluff; but I am convinced that there is no help for him.”

Bruenn very serious…. He wanted to know how long I had had this feeling. I told him for a year, but worried particularly because of the Boss’s indifference after the Chicago convention—didn’t act like a man who cared a damn about the election.

Hassett noted that the Republican tactics in the 1944 campaign had reengaged Roosevelt. “F.D.R. got his Dutch up. That did the trick. He got madder and madder over Dewey’s technique.” But the improvement didn’t last much beyond the election.

I could not but notice his increasing weariness as I handled his papers with him, particularly at Hyde Park, trip after trip. He was always willing to go through the day’s routine, but there was less and less talk about all manner of things—fewer local Hyde Park stories, politics, books, pictures. The old zest was going.

I told Bruenn I had every confidence in his own skill; was satisfied that the Boss was the beneficiary of everything that the healing art can devise. I couldn’t suggest anything which should be done differently. But in my opinion the Boss was beyond all human resources. I mentioned his feeble signature—the old boldness of stroke and liberal use of ink gone, signature often ending in a fade-out.

He said that not important. Reluctantly admitted the Boss in a precarious condition, but his condition not hopeless. He could be saved if measures were adopted to rescue him from certain mental strains and emotional influences, which he mentioned.

I told him that his conditions could not be met and added that this talk confirmed my conviction that the Boss is leaving us.

For several days Bruenn seemed the better forecaster. Spring had arrived in Georgia, with warm days and cool nights. Roosevelt responded to the old place, and his appetite and energy returned. He spoke with friends and toured the countryside in his open car. He attended Easter services on April 1. On April 9 he had himself driven the eighty-five miles to Macon, where he met Lucy Rutherfurd and artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, coming over from Aiken, South Carolina. Shoumatoff had painted his portrait and wanted to paint another. The two women joined Roosevelt and Daisy Suckley for the ride back to Warm Springs. Daisy wished they hadn’t gone so far. “The drive was too long,” she wrote that evening. “F. was chilly and looked awfully tired all evening.”

But Howard Bruenn was quietly encouraged. “His color was much better, and his appetite was very good,” the physician wrote on April 10. “He asked for double helpings of food.” Roosevelt seemed to be gaining weight, although he wasn’t actually weighed. He was sleeping well. He laid plans for a busy weekend, including a barbecue. He attended to the details sufficiently to remark that he had never liked barbecued pork; he told Hassett to request that the manager of the Warm Springs Hotel rustle up the ingredients for Brunswick stew—“preceded by an Old-fashioned cocktail.” On a drive about the grounds he encountered reporter Merriman Smith, who was on horseback. “His voice was wonderful and resonant,” Smith recalled. “It sounded like the Roosevelt of old. In tones that must have been audible a block away, Roosevelt hailed me with, ‘Heigh-o, Silver!’” To Henry Morgenthau, visiting on Treasury business, the president described his intention to open the United Nations conference in San Francisco in two weeks. “I have been offered a beautiful apartment by a lady in the top floor of some hotel, but I am not taking it,” he said. “I am going there on my train, and at three o’clock in the afternoon I will appear on the stage in my wheelchair, and I will make the speech. And then they will applaud me, and I will leave and go back on my train…. I will be back in Hyde Park on May first.”

“I
N THE QUIET
beauty of the Georgia spring, like a thief in the night, came the day of the Lord,” Hassett wrote on April 12. “Of course I had seen it coming for all too long, but little thought the end so near.”

Roosevelt awoke just after nine. Bruenn conducted the morning examination. “He had slept well but complained of a slight headache and some stiffness of the neck,” Bruenn noted. “He ascribed this to a soreness of the muscles.” Bruenn gave him a light massage, which alleviated the symptoms. “He had a very good morning.” Daisy thought Roosevelt seemed better than in many days. “He came in, looking very fine in a double-breasted grey suit and a crimson tie,” she wrote in her diary for that day. “His color was good, and he looked smiling and happy and ready for anything.”