The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014) s01e07 Episode Script

1 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.
" Funding for this program was provided by members of The Better Angels Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating Americans about their history through documentary film.
Members include Jessica and John Fullerton, The Pfeil Foudation, Joan Wellhouse Newton, Bonnie and Tom McCloskey, and The Golkin Family.
Additional funding was provided by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, dedicated to strengthening America's future through education; by the National Endowment for the Humanities, exploring the human endeavor; by Mr.
Jack C.
Taylor and by Rosalind P.
Walter.
Major funding was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the generous contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
Thank you.
Before the names Theodore, Eleanor, and Franklin were indelibly etched into the American consciousness and the course of human history was forever changed by their individual endeavors, a prominent family made a point of teaching the value of altruism, the power of perseverance, and the virtue of helping out one's fellow man.
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.
" To learn more about the rich history and legacy of one of the most influential families in American history, go to PBS.
org/theroosevelts.
"The Roosevelts: An Intimate History" is available on blu-ray and DVD.
The Companion book is also available.
To order, visit shoppbs.
org or call 1-800-play-PBS.
Also available for download from iTunes.