Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (164 page)

Hassett saw things differently. “He was in good spirits but did not look well,” Hassett recorded. “Color bad; countenance registered great weariness.” Hassett left the president’s cottage to attend to minor business. The official pouch from Washington was late arriving and didn’t reach the compound until after noon. There was a large volume of mail, which Hassett carried up to the president’s cottage. “Was shocked at the President’s appearance,” he wrote. Elizabeth Shoumatoff was sketching Roosevelt, measuring his nose and other features, asking him to turn this way and that and generally—as Hassett interpreted the situation—making a pest of herself. “Altogether too aggressive,” Hassett remarked. Roosevelt was being patient, but with effort. “The President looked so fatigued and weary…. When I left the cottage, I was fully resolved to ask Bruenn to put an end to this unnecessary hounding of a sick man.”

Roosevelt didn’t notice Hassett’s concern. The president was seated at a table going through the mail. Lucy and Daisy occupied a sofa across the room. Daisy was crocheting; the two women chatted idly between themselves and with Roosevelt. Arthur Prettyman, Roosevelt’s longtime valet, and Joe Esperancilla, Prettyman’s helper, were putting out lunch. “We have fifteen minutes more to work,” the president told Shoumatoff.

Suddenly a strange expression came over his face. His head tilted toward the table, and his hands began to fumble among the letters. Daisy thought he was trying to find something.

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.”

He slumped over and lost consciousness.

Prettyman and Esperancilla carried Roosevelt into his bedroom. Daisy called the Warm Springs operator and told her to locate Bruenn and send him at once. The doctor arrived in ten minutes and found Roosevelt pale, unconscious, and cold, but sweating profusely. His heart rate was 96 beats per minute, and his blood pressure 300 over 190. Mild spasms caused his body to twitch periodically. His right pupil was greatly dilated, suggesting bleeding in the brain. “It was apparent that the President had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage,” Bruenn recorded. The cardiologist administered papavarine and amylnitrite, to ease the constriction of the blood vessels. He called Ross McIntire in Washington and explained the situation. McIntire immediately phoned another specialist, James Paullin, a consultant to the navy on Roosevelt’s case and others, in Atlanta.

Bruenn monitored Roosevelt’s condition during the next hour. The president rallied slightly. His color improved and his blood pressure fell to 210 over 110.

But then the left pupil began to dilate. Roosevelt’s respiration slowed considerably, and he became cyanotic—his skin began turning blue, starting with the fingertips, from lack of oxygen.

At 3:30, Bruenn noted that Roosevelt’s breathing was irregular yet fairly strong. Within the minute, though, the president stopped breathing. He gasped a few times, but then the gasps too ceased. Bruenn listened for a heartbeat but heard nothing. He attempted artificial respiration without effect. He injected Roosevelt with caffeine sodium benzoate in a skeletal muscle, and then adrenalin directly into the heart muscle. Neither restored the heart’s action. At this point Dr. Paullin arrived from Atlanta.

But there was nothing he could do, either. At 3:35 Bruenn pronounced Roosevelt dead.

57.

T
HE NEWS HIT
A
MERICA LIKE NOTHING SINCE
P
EARL
H
ARBOR
. T
HE
White House announced the death as rush hour that Thursday evening was beginning on the East Coast. Riders on buses and trolleys heard rumors and stepped off to confirm them; straphangers clambered out of the subway tunnels to ask policemen and passersby if the reports were true. In residential neighborhoods women left dinners cooking on their stoves to meet neighbors at the street corners and share their shock. Restaurants closed early that evening. Some bars did the same; other stayed open to let their patrons drown their sorrow. Concert halls, theaters, and clubs canceled performances. At New York’s Stage Door Canteen, the director of
The Seven Lively Arts Show
came on stage during the early performance and signaled for the orchestra to stop playing. “I have a terrible announcement to make,” he said. “Out of respect to the memory of the President of the United States, this show cannot go on.” The audience had arrived before the tragic news was broadcast, and they looked at one another with puzzled expressions. “The President has just died,” the director explained, to gasps throughout the house.

The four major radio networks suspended commercial programming. The New York Stock Exchange announced that it would be closed the next day in the president’s honor. Early-season baseball games were canceled. Flags on government buildings dipped to half-staff. Fire departments sounded their alarms in the “four fives,” the fireman’s requiem. Church bells tolled. Moments of silence—some organized, some spontaneous—were observed on military bases, in government offices, in shops and businesses, at schools.

Men and women wept openly. “No matter what your politics, he was a great man and a good man,” a New Yorker declared, wiping the tears from his cheeks. An older gentleman in Washington said he felt “as though I had died myself.” A woman in the capital particularly mourned the timing. “If only he could have lived until after Germany falls,” she said.

Soldiers took the news especially hard. “‘My God!’ was the immediate and almost universal reaction,” a journalist with the Third Army in Germany recorded. “Most could say no more.” But a few did say more. “I can remember the president ever since I was a little kid,” a private first class from Kentucky explained. “America will seem a strange, empty place without his voice talking to the people whenever great events occur. He died fighting for democracy, the same as any soldier.” A private with the Seventh Army said, “I couldn’t believe such a thing could happen. President Roosevelt was so important to us, I can hardly believe he is gone.” An army air forces officer shook his head. “I feel just like we had lost the war,” he declared. “That’s how bad I feel.” A tank sergeant on leave in Paris responded with redoubled determination. He immediately contacted his superior officer and demanded permission to return to the front at once. “I voted for him four times for president,” he said. “Since I can’t vote for him the fifth time, the least I can do is go back up there and fight for him.” This Roosevelt loyalist refused to give the reporter his name, insisting on being identified as “just one of his fighting Joes.”

World leaders registered heartfelt admiration for the deceased and concern at what his passing implied. A Chinese government spokesman said that Chiang Kai-shek was “visibly stunned” on hearing of the death. Georges Bidault, the French foreign minister, called it “a great disaster.” Charles de Gaulle declared, “I am more shocked than I can say. It is a terrible loss not only for our country and me personally but for all human-kind.” Stalin lamented the departure of “the leader in the cause of ensuring the security of the whole world.”

In London, Churchill’s dismay was revealed in unaccustomed brevity. He addressed Commons:

The House will have heard, with the deepest sorrow, the grievous news which has come to us from across the Atlantic, which conveys to us the loss of the famous president of the United States, whose friendship for the cause of freedom and for the cause of the weak and poor has won him immortal fame. It is not fitting that we should continue our work this day.

The House thereupon adjourned.

Remembrance took various forms in other countries. France observed a national day of mourning, an honor never before accorded anyone not French. Schools in France spent the day teaching the life and achievements of Franklin Roosevelt. Courts and schools in Italy closed to honor the liberator of Italy from fascism. Crowds gathered on the streets and in the metro stations of Moscow, wondering what the news from America meant for Russia. In Scotland 130,000 soccer fans stood bare-headed and silent during a Glasgow match, mourning the father of Lend-Lease and the architect of the Grand Alliance. A spokesman for the Mexican government called Roosevelt’s death “an irreparable loss, not only to the United States but to the whole world.” In Havana, President Ramón Grau San Martín asserted, “Cuba has lost a great friend.” The prime minister of New Zealand called Roosevelt’s death “a colossal loss to mankind.” The Australian government issued a statement: “He gave everything to the cause of freedom and liberty and did not spare himself.”

The Axis governments responded ambivalently. The new Japanese prime minister, Kantaro Suzuki, conveyed his “profound sympathy” to the American people, even while adding, “I must admit Roosevelt’s leadership has been very effective and has been responsible for the Americans’ advantageous position today.” In Berlin, the Nazi propaganda machine required a day to get its orders from Joseph Goebbels. But once it did, it applauded the death of the “war criminal” Roosevelt as a “miracle,” on the order of the Führer’s survival of the bombing attempt against his life the previous summer.

E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT WAS
holding her regular press conference that Thursday morning in Washington. She had been worried about Franklin for months. “He should gain weight but hates his food,” she wrote a friend. “I say a prayer daily that he may be able to carry on till we have peace and our feet are set in the right direction.” The road to peace, Eleanor judged, ran through San Francisco, where America would join with the other countries to establish the permanent structure of international security. At her press conference she fielded questions implying that the United States could somehow dictate policy to the United Nations. She knew from talking to Franklin about Yalta that this wasn’t so, and she tried to disabuse reporters of the concept. “We will have to get over the habit of saying what we as a single nation will do,” she said. “When we say ‘we’ on international questions in the future, we will mean all the people who have an interest in the question.”

That afternoon she was meeting with a State Department adviser to the delegation the administration was planning to send to San Francisco when she was summoned to the telephone. Laura Delano was calling from Warm Springs saying that Franklin had fainted. He was currently in bed and under Dr. Bruenn’s care. Eleanor tactfully closed the meeting and called Ross McIntire. The admiral-doctor tried not to sound alarmed, and he suggested that she proceed with her afternoon schedule but fly with him to Warm Springs afterward. An abrupt cancellation would cause people to talk, perhaps needlessly.

She drove to an annual benefit for a thrift shop run by the Sulgrave Club, near Dupont Circle. She welcomed those attending and urged them to support this worthy cause. She had just finished speaking when a call came from the White House. Steve Early asked her to return to the mansion at once. “I did not even ask why,” she remembered. “I knew down in my heart that something dreadful had happened.” She apologized to her hosts without sharing her forebodings. “I got into the car and sat with clenched hands all the way to the White House. In my heart of hearts I knew what had happened, but one does not actually formulate these terrible thoughts until they are spoken.”

At the White House, Early and McIntire explained that the president had died. Eleanor wasn’t surprised, and she maintained her composure. “I am more sorry for the people of the country and the world than I am for us,” she said. She thought of the children. Anna was with her and heard the news directly. Eleanor cabled the sad tidings to the boys: Elliott in Europe, and James, Franklin Jr., and John in the Pacific. “Father slept away,” she said. “He would expect you to carry on and finish your jobs.”

Harry Truman had been summoned to the White House at the same time as Eleanor. The vice president was now shown into the First Lady’s sitting room. “Harry,” she said, “the President is dead.”

Truman, like so many others that day, was stunned. He required a few moments to find words. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he said.

“Is there anything
we
can do for
you
?” she responded. “You are the one in trouble now.”