Roosevelt (106 page)

“Well, Mr. Roosevelt, do you believe in reincarnation?” Did
she
believe in it? he countered. She didn’t know, Lizzie said, but if there was such a thing she wanted to come back as a canary bird.

“A
canary bird!”
The President looked at her two-hundred-pound frame, threw his paper down, and burst out laughing. Lizzie McDuffie would never forget that scene: the President with his head thrown back, his eyes closed, laughing and exclaiming—as she had heard him do a hundred times—“Don’t you love it? Don’t you
love
it?”

When Hassett reached the Little White House around noon with the delayed mail pouch, Roosevelt was sitting in the living room in his leather armchair chatting with his cousins Margaret Suckley and Laura Delano and with Mrs. Winthrop Rutherfurd. Two years before, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd had commissioned a portrait painter, Elizabeth Shoumatoff, to do a water color of the President; recently he had asked the artist to paint another picture
of him as a gift to Lucy’s daughter. Madame Shoumatoff came in while Roosevelt was signing a sheaf of appointments and awards Hassett had put before him—signing them as usual with a wide flowing pen, so that Hassett had to spread them out to dry. The usual banter followed about putting out Hassett’s laundry. One document was a bill just passed by Congress to continue the Commodity Credit Corporation and increase its borrowing power. The President signed it with a flourish, telling the ladies, “Here’s where I make a law.”

Hassett looked on disapprovingly as the painter set up her easel, measured Roosevelt’s nose, asked him to turn back and forth. His boss looked much too weary for all this, he felt. He collected the signed documents and departed, leaving the President with some papers to read while he was being sketched. The room was quiet now. The artist continued her work, but the President became so intent in his reading that he fell out of his pose. She used the time to fill in colors. At one o’clock the President looked at his watch.

“We’ve got just fifteen minutes more.” The houseboy was setting the dining table on the other side of the room. Margaret Suckley continued to crochet, Laura Delano to fill vases with flowers. Lucy Rutherfurd watched the President. He made a little joke and looked into her smiling face. He lit a cigarette and studied his papers.

The fifteen minutes were almost up when the President raised his left hand to his temple, dropped it limply, then raised and pressed it behind his neck. He said very quietly: “I have a terrific headache.” Then his arm dropped, his head fell to the left, his body slumped. A call went out to Dr. Bruenn, who had been sunning himself at the pool. When Bruenn arrived, the President was still slumped in his chair; only with difficulty was the heavy, inert body carried into the bedroom. The President’s breathing stopped, then started again in great snoring gasps. Bruenn sheared away his clothes; injected papaverine and amyl nitrate; and telephoned Admiral McIntire in Washington. Madame Shoumatoff had already left with Mrs. Rutherfurd. Hassett arrived and knew the end was near when he heard the awful labored breathing. Grace Tully sat quietly in a corner, her lips moving in prayer. The minutes ticked by; the breathing grew more tortured; then it stopped. Bruenn could hear no heart sounds. He injected adrenalin into the heart muscle. No response. At 3:55
P.M.
Bruenn pronounced him dead.

Grace Tully walked into the bedroom, kissed the President lightly on the forehead, then walked out onto the porch and stood there wordless and tearless. The reporters were summoned from the
barbecue on Pine Mountain. They swept into the little house. Hassett was standing near the center of the living room. “Gentlemen,” he said quietly, “it is my sad duty to inform you that the President of the United States is dead….”

The news came to Churchill in his study at 10 Downing Street just before midnight; for a long time he sat stunned and silent, feeling as though he had been struck a physical blow. In Moscow, Harriman was awakened at 2:00
A.M.;
he drove to the Kremlin to see Stalin, who seemed moved and preoccupied by the news as he held the envoy’s hand for a long moment, saying nothing. In Chungking, the Generalissimo received the news as he began eating breakfast; he left the meal untouched and retired for mourning. In Japan, an announcer for Radio Tokyo read the death bulletin and unaccountably presented some special music “in honor of the passing of a great man.”

In Berlin, the news came to Goebbels on the steps of the Propaganda Ministry just after a bombing attack. His exultant face could be seen in the light of the flames from the burning Chancellery across the Wilhelmplatz. He had been telling the Führer and others that Germany would be saved at the eleventh hour by an unexpected event, just as Frederick the Great had been saved by the death of the Czarina two centuries before. He called for champagne and telephoned Hitler, who was in his deep bunker.

“My Führer! I congratulate you. Roosevelt is dead. It is written in the stars that the second half of April will be the turning point for us. This is Friday 13 April. It is the turning point!”

Next morning the army band and a thousand infantrymen from Fort Benning, black streamers flying from their colors, led the hearse between lines of helmeted paratroopers down the curving red clay road through the Warm Springs Foundation. Behind came Eleanor Roosevelt in an open car, Fala at her feet. At Georgia Hall patients in wheel chairs waved farewell to the friend who had presided at their Thanksgiving dinners and swum with them in the warm pool. Graham Jackson had waited at the barbecue to play his accordion for the President; now, his face a map of anguish and disbelief, he stepped out from the columned portico and rendered “Going Home.” Its drums beating a steady, deadened roll, the procession wound down to the little railroad station. The heavy, flag-draped coffin was handed through a window into the rear car of the presidential train. There it rested on a pine box so low that only the top of the casket could be seen through the windows. Four servicemen stood guard. The train started imperceptibly and began rolling down the track to Atlanta.

Reprinted by permission of the New York
Post,
© 1969, New York Post Corporation

Eleanor Roosevelt sat in the presidential lounge car. The afternoon before, she had been at the White House when word came from Warm Springs that her husband had fainted;. Admiral McIntire, in Washington, advised her to go ahead with a speaking engagement so that people would not be alarmed. She had done so, with her unquenchable sense of duty, only to be called back to the White House and told the definite news. She had had time to ask Harry Truman, “Is there anything we can do for
you?”
; to send a message to her four soldier sons, “He did his job to the end as he would want you to do.” Then she had flown south with Early and McIntire.

While the train rolled through the gently billowing land of west central Georgia—his adopted state, Roosevelt called it—the world was trying to adjust to the death of the President. Almost everywhere the first reactions had been shock, incredulity, grief, and fear. Now it was time for second thoughts. Editorialists struggled to capture the nature of the man, the meaning of his life, the measure of the loss.

It was no easy task, for even those who knew Roosevelt best agreed that he was a man infinitely complex and almost incomprehensible. On such a relatively simple matter as his behavior toward fellow human beings he oscillated; like all men, he was both generous and vindictive, but it was Roosevelt’s mixture of the two qualities that was so baffling. Even now, friends of Al Smith were remembering how Roosevelt had befriended him during the war
years and tried to bail out his Empire State Building, even though the “Happy Warrior” had scathingly attacked the New Deal. But Henry Luce, who had not treated the President ungently, was suddenly and arbitrarily barred by the White House from touring the Pacific Theater; he would hate Roosevelt to his dying day. The President could get along with anyone he wanted to, from Stalin to MacArthur to Huey Long to the man in the street; people in Warm Springs remembered the time he was driving his little car through the town and had stopped and waved over a Negro walking by; how the “colored man was scared, scraping his feet and all….Then, first you know, he was leaning on the President’s automobile, throwing his arms around like he was talking to anybody.” Yet people as different as Jim Farley and Dean Acheson felt that he condescended—that he conveyed, Acheson felt, much of the attitude of European royalty.

South of Gainesville, Georgia, black women in a cotton field saw the train coming and fell to their knees in supplication. It was remarkable, this human touch of the President’s, but sometimes his charm had an edge of coquetry and pretense. Marshal Sir William Sholto-Douglas, of the RAF, remembered how Roosevelt had greeted him with a lecture on Scottish history and the achievements of the Douglases, told how he had a Scottish grandmother himself, and so on. Douglas sensed an indefinable flaw in his manner; he felt that he was witnessing some kind of performance—still, he was moved to the point that tears came to his eyes, and Roosevelt, he confessed later, nearly had him eating out of his hand. Jesse Jones, just fired from the administration, told a reporter that the President was a hypocrite and lacking in character but “you just can’t help liking that fellow.”

Along with all his democratic manner and instincts he had that curious interest in royal and noble personages and doings. He told a friend, rather improbably, that he had been hurt in England after the first war when he had not been invited to Buckingham Palace. In a different vein, and most curiously, he allowed and even encouraged Adolf Berle to call him “Caesar” in addressing the President in private. Berle, who was always bemused by the irony of power, was still calling him this the last time he saw Roosevelt, just after Yalta. Did the President derive from the term some curious satisfaction that outweighed the risk of his enemies discovering it and gleefully publicizing it—or did he tolerate Berle’s fun because he enjoyed imagining what they would do if they
did
find out about it?

Night came, and the funeral train—blacked out except for the ghostly, half-lit rear coach—wove slowly back and forth through the
Carolina piedmont. Looking out from her berth at the countryside her husband loved, Eleanor Roosevelt glimpsed the solemn faces of the crowds at the depots and crossroads. The train would arrive in Washington eighty years to the day after Lincoln was shot. Eleanor remembered Millard Lampell’s poem “The Lonesome Train”:

“A lonesome train on a lonesome track, Seven coaches painted black….

A slow train, a quiet train,

Carrying Lincoln home again….”

The train wove back and forth but always returned to a bearing on north. Perhaps it was in Roosevelt’s home that the main clues to his character lay. William James, borrowing from Cardinal Newman, spoke of the “once-born,” those who easily fitted into the ideology of their time, and of those “sick souls” and “divided selves” who went through a second birth, seizing on a second ideology. Roosevelt was one of the once-born. His identity was formed in a stable and harmonious family; he moved securely and surely from the pedestal of the only child of doting parents into the wider but equally untroubled environments of Hyde Park, Groton, and Harvard friendships. If his loving references to his Hyde Park home were not revealing enough of his sense of identity and of roots, his habit all through his presidency of reducing policies and programs to terms of home and family would have betrayed his thinking; thus the Good Neighbor policy, the Big Four constables or policemen, the Lend-Lease “garden hose”; his idea that new institutions like the United Nations must toddle like a child for a few years before gaining strength; his repeated references to heads of state sitting around the table like members of the same family, or like neighbors, and his suggestion on at least one occasion that the best way to keep peace in a family—he was referring to de Gaulle and the other Frenchmen—was to keep the members of the family
apart.

With an assurance undergirded by this sense of identity, Roosevelt moved from Groton and Harvard into the muckraking decade of Theodore Roosevelt, into the simmering politics of the Hudson Valley, into the reformist and idealistic mood of the Wilson years. It was with this assurance, sometimes bordering on arrogance, that he could confront and overcome his domestic adversaries of the 1930’s—and do so without personal hatred for a Huey Long, a Carter Glass, a Norman Thomas, an Al Smith, or a Wendell Willkie. He reserved his hatred for people in his own social world, such as Hamilton Fish, who he felt had betrayed him; as they did for him.

He embraced the ideology of freedom not with the demonic passion of the true believer who possesses a creed and ends up being possessed by it, but with the easy assurance of a man who slowly fashions his political faith, borrowing from the thinkers and political leaders of the day, reshaping his ideas as he undergoes new experiences and lives through changing times—and hence can, when necessary, keep his distance from its possessive demands. He overcame his adversaries not only because he outwitted and out-maneuvered and outstayed them, but also because he outsermonized and outmoralized them. Only a man deadly serious and supremely self-assured could have spent the time Roosevelt did appealing to old-fashioned moralisms of home and school, the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments as interpreted by Endicott Peabody, the maxims of freedom as practiced by Wilson and Al Smith, the “simple rules of human conduct to which we always go back,” as he said in 1932. So certain was he of the Tightness of his aims that he was willing to use Machiavellian means to reach them; and his moral certainty made him all the more effective in the struggle. He used the tricks of the fox to serve the purposes of the lion.