April 12, 1945, 80 years ago: Two of the U.S. Army's leading Generals meet to discuss how to make the final surge on Nazi Germany. The Supreme Commander of Allied forces, Dwight D. Eisenhower, suggests sending U.S. troops through the industrial heart of the nation, the south.
But George S. Patton suggests that the main U.S. force go right for the capital, Berlin, and continue to the river that was then the border between Germany and Poland: "And on to the Oder!" Patton was already thinking of the future, one where the Soviet Union might control Eastern Europe, including parts of Germany.
Eisenhower thought of Berlin, and asked Patton, "Who would want it?" Patton said, "I think history will answer that question for you, Ike."
But Eisenhower thought that, for all they suffered in World War II, the Soviets deserved to be the ones to take Berlin. Patton could have gone over Eisenhower's head, to the Commander-in-Chief, but he didn't.
It wouldn't have mattered if he had, because this was the day that President Franklin D. Roosevelt died.
At 1:00 PM, U.S. Eastern Time, he was at the "Southern White House" he had built at Warm Springs, Georgia, at the health spa where he had once tried in vain to recover from the effects of polio. He was posing for a portrait, being painted by Russian exile Elizabeth Shoumatoff, when he suddenly dropped the papers he was reading, put his hand to the back of his head, and said, "I have a terrific headache," and lost consciousness.
A doctor was retrieved. After 12 years and 1 month, the longest Presidency ever, of fighting the Great Depression, Nazi Fascism and Japanese imperialism, FDR's blood pressure (according to a document released on the 75th Anniversary by his Presidential Library) was 300 over 190. He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Death came to him at 3:35 PM. He was 63 years old.
The portrait was never finished. It now hangs in the house at Warm Springs, next to an earlier portrait she had painted of him.
Vice President Harry S Truman was presiding over the U.S. Senate, and went to see the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn of Texas. As Rayburn began pouring drinks, he remembered that Stephen Early, the White House Press Secretary, had called, and asked to have Truman call him back. Why the Secret Service didn't immediately whisk Truman away is a question for them, not that their current counterparts would answer it now.
Truman called the White House, and Early told him, "Please come over here as quickly and as quietly as possible." In a letter to his mother, Martha Ellen Young, who lived another 2 years, Truman claimed that he had no idea of what this was about. Truman was what would now be called a "mama's boy," and I find it impossible to believe he would lie to his mother.
But there was a 3rd man in that room, Lewis Deschler, the House parliamentarian and a key aide to Rayburn. In his 1975 biography Sam Rayburn, Alfred Steinberg quoted Deschler, by then the last survivor, as saying that Truman yelled, "Holy General Jackson!" as if he knew exactly what the call meant.
In his 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Truman, David McCullough found Steinberg's notes, and realized that Steinberg had cleaned the words up for public consumption: According to Deschler, what Truman actually said was, "Jesus Christ and General Jackson!" As if he was putting the two of them on the same level.
Regardless of whether Truman or Deschler was telling the truth, Truman did as Early asked, and was taken to a room where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was sitting all alone. According to Truman, that's when he guessed. She said, "Harry, the President is dead." After pausing to collect himself, Truman asked, "Is there anything I can do for you?" Knowing that it was true, she said, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now."
His wife Bess and their daughter Margaret were called from their apartment on Connecticut Avenue, and brought to the White House. At 7:09 PM, 3 hours and 34 minutes after FDR's death, Harry S Truman was sworn in as the 33rd President of the United States.
The new President, his wife Bess, their daughter Margaret
You'll notice that there is no period after the S. When Truman was born, there was a disagreement over what his middle name should be. Traditionally, middle names were either the same as that of the boy's father -- (First Name) (Middle Name) (Last Name) (Jr., III, IV, and so on); or that of the mother's family, as with Franklin Delano Roosevelt; or there was no middle name at all.
When Truman was born on May 8, 1884 in Lamar, Missouri, outside Kansas City, he was named for a maternal uncle, Harrison "Harry" Young -- but his legal first name was Harry, not Harrison. One grandfather was Anderson Shipp Truman, and the other was Solomon Young. A compromise was reached, and "S" became his entire middle name, honoring both "Shipp" and "Solomon." A split down the middle that the original King Solomon might have appreciated.
Nevertheless, when the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Harlan Stone, recited the Oath of Office for Truman to repeat, he made a mistake, saying, "I, Harry Solomon Truman, do solemnly swear... " The new President, correctly, said, "I, Harry S Truman, do solemnly swear... " He did not hold it against Stone, who, most likely, had probably simply heard the story wrong.
Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1886, from FDR's death on April 12, 1945 until the passage of the next Presidential Succession Act on July 18, 1947, the man next in line for the Presidency was the Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius. The 1947 Act put the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and then the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, in the line of succession, between the Vice President and the Cabinet. So, from July 18, 1947 until January 3, 1949, the man next in line was Joseph W. Martin of Massachusetts, a Republican. From January 3 to 20, 1949, it was Sam Rayburn.
That night, Truman was told by a U.S. Army General that a powerful bomb was being developed, but got no details. It wasn't until the next day that he learned of the Manhattan Project. Unlike in more recent times, when the President keeps the Vice President in the loop about national security matters, in case of just such an emergency as his own death, FDR hadn't told Truman about the development of the atomic bomb.
The news is announced to the world at 5:50 PM, Eastern Time. In the shock and the sadness, with World War II still going -- and FDR knowing far better than the general public how close the Allies were to victory -- the question is asked, "What do we do now?" After all, the distribution of information wasn’t like today: Outside of Washington, D.C. and his native Missouri, not that many people knew much about Truman.
Graham Jackson, a black Chief Petty Officer in the U.S. Navy, played many instruments, and had performed for Franklin and Eleanor at Warm Springs a few times, becoming a friend. On April 13, as FDR's coffin was loaded onto a train to take it north to Washington, Jackson tearfully played "Goin' Home," a spiritual based on a tune by Antonin Dvořák, on his accordion. Life magazine photographer Ed Clark took a picture of this, and it not only appeared in the magazine, but won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography. Jackson lived until 1983, Clark until 2000.
On April 14, a state funeral was held in Washington. On April 16, FDR was laid to rest with a large but simple marble gravestone at his home and Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, on the Hudson River, 78 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, and 67 miles south of the State Capitol in Albany. His Scottish terrier, Fala, would join him there in 1952; and Eleanor would in 1962.
FDR's death plunged the nation into mourning, the kind unseen since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at the close of the American Civil War, 80 years earlier. Adolf Hitler momentarily believed that FDR's death was a sign that Nazi Germany would somehow turn things around and win World War II. But he lived only 18 days after FDR. V-E Day, Victory in Europe, would come 26 days after FDR's death; V-J Day, Victory in Japan and the end of World War II, 124 days after.
In 1999, writing for Time, Walter Isaacson, the magazine's editor, said he chose Albert Einstein as the magazine's Person of the Century, because the century was driven more by science than, as he put it, "statecraft." But he acknowledged that, despite the magazine having chosen Winston Churchill as "Man of the Half-Century" in 1949 -- along with Life, it was then run by the archconservative Henry Luce, who once told FDR he was one of those "who hate your gaudy guts" -- the world at the end of the 20th Century much more closely resembled the vision of FDR than any of the other major players of World War II, including the not-as-democratic-as-he-then-appeared Churchill. Certainly, it was much more FDR's world than Hitler's, or Joseph Stalin's, or Hideki Tojo's.
And let's not forget, it was FDR who read Einstein's letter of 1939 and decided that America had to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis could -- and did. So if there is a Person of the Century for 1900 to 1999, it is Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
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