FDR - Jean Edward Smith [397]
On one afternoon outing Roosevelt encountered Merriman Smith, the White House pool reporter from United Press, riding a horse he had hired at the village drugstore. “As I reined in the horse,” Smith remembered, the president “bowed majestically to me. His voice was wonderful and resonant. It sounded like the Roosevelt of old. In tones that must have been audible blocks away, FDR hailed me with ‘Heigh Ho, Silver!.’ ”169
On Monday, April 9, Lucy Rutherfurd arrived from Aiken, South Carolina, with her friend the society portraitist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, whom she had commissioned to paint a portrait of the president. Doris Kearns Goodwin reports that presidential phone logs reveal that in the days leading up to her visit, FDR called Lucy almost daily from Warm Springs.170 Dinner that evening was festive. Shoumatoff reported that the president was “full of jokes” and seemed constantly to address himself to Lucy in a wide-ranging conversation that moved from Churchill to Stalin to food.171
On April 11 Roosevelt worked on his Jefferson Day address for the Democratic faithful. He penned the peroration in his own hand:
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.172
That evening Henry Morgenthau came to dinner. He was shocked at the president’s appearance. “I found he had aged terrifically and looked very haggard. His hands shook so that he started to knock over the glasses. I had to hold each glass as he poured out the cocktail.… I found his memory bad and he was constantly confusing names. I have never seen him have so much difficulty transferring himself from his wheelchair to a regular chair, and I was in agony watching him.”173
The following day, Thursday, April 12, 1945, Roosevelt sat in the living room of the Little White House while Elizabeth Shoumatoff painted. She was struck how much better the president looked. The “gray look” had disappeared, and he had “exceptionally good color.” Later Shoumatoff learned from doctors that Roosevelt’s flushed appearance was a warning sign of an approaching cerebral hemorrhage.174
Shortly before one o’clock the butler came in to set the table for lunch. FDR glanced at his watch and said, “We have fifteen minutes more to work.” Then suddenly, he put his hand to his head in a quick jerky manner. “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” he said.175 Roosevelt slumped forward and collapsed. He never regained consciousness. At 3:35 P.M. Dr. Bruenn pronounced the president dead.
The world mourned. “I was overpowered by a sense of deep and irrefutable loss,” wrote Churchill.176 In Moscow, Averell Harriman drove to the Kremlin to inform Stalin. The Soviet leader was “deeply distressed” and held Harriman’s hand for perhaps thirty seconds before asking him to sit down. “President Roosevelt has died but his cause must live on,” he told Harriman and then agreed to send Molotov to represent the Soviet Union at the upcoming United Nations conference in San Francisco.177 Senator Robert Taft, long in opposition, captured the moment. “The President’s death,” he said, “removed the greatest figure of our time at the very climax of his career, and shocks the world to which his words and actions were more important than those of any other man. He dies a hero of the war, for he literally worked himself to death in the service of the American people.”178
On a soggy country road behind enemy lines near Pffeffenhausen, Germany, a band of American prisoners of war was being marched to a new enclosure, presumably to prevent their liberation by advancing Allied forces. From the German guards they learned that President Roosevelt was dead. At noon the ranking American officer climbed a nearby hill, accompanied by a bugler. He turned and addressed his fellow prisoners: “I have been