But as the rumors about his health spread, Roosevelt’s temper was up. He became incensed and energized. He would not be written off. Newsman David Brinkley would later note, “For months, he had seemed withdrawn and depressed, taking little interest in anything, unwilling to contribute more than a written statement now and then to his campaign. But for a moment in the fall of 1944 he regained his strength, driven by his hatred for Thomas E. Dewey.”
EVENTS IN THE REST of the world were not waiting for either Franklin Roosevelt or the November 1944 election. Since early June, even though the German war machine was slowly and inexorably retreating from northern France, all across Europe trains had continued to chug north and east, past once glittering Vienna, past Kraków, pulling into the Auschwitz station. The script was the same. The disabled, the sick, the pregnant, children as well as old people, were still being gassed at the astounding rate of two thousand every thirty minutes—so that in a matter of hours more people were lost than in the entire first day’s assault at Normandy. After a brief slowdown in July, the gas chambers were now working at full speed again.
On August 1, the conquered Poles defiantly rose up against the Germans in the city of Warsaw. Shortly thereafter, in Amsterdam, Gestapo agents were now coming, their boots pounding through the streets and up the stairs to the secret annex where the family of Otto Frank had been hiding. And awaiting them was Otto’s daughter Anne. She, with the rest of her family, would board the last deportation train from the Netherlands to Auschwitz.
ON AUGUST 23, AS the Germans were bringing heavy mortars, incendiary rockets, and a remote-controlled vehicle mine into Warsaw in a further attempt to break the uprising, and Paris, the city of light, was being liberated by the Allies, Roosevelt was back for a brief stay in Washington, D.C. With Eleanor still in Hyde Park, Roosevelt spent an hour of the afternoon with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, along with her daughter and stepson, and Roosevelt’s daughter Anna. They gathered on the South Portico and were served tea and biscuits. Returning to Hyde Park a week later, Roosevelt had his train take a different route and stopped at Lucy’s estate in northern New Jersey. He even had her listen in as he spoke by phone with Churchill. The two heads of state were to meet, this time in Quebec, the following day, for their seventh summit. Churchill said he would be bringing his wife and Roosevelt replied that he would bring Eleanor. Afterward, the president asked the Secret Service if this New Jersey route could be used now and again to get to Hyde Park. After a study, the agents replied yes.
The Quebec summit of September 1944 was the start of a grueling fall season. At that time, the combined military chiefs were projecting that Germany would surrender within twelve weeks—by Christmas. Roosevelt apparently remained more skeptical, but he was still quite intent on establishing zones of occupation, and he was even willing to have the Americans take on the task of overseeing France. What to do about postwar Germany was more vexing. How, he wondered, to extract retribution and neutralize any future German threat, without sowing the seeds for another world war, as had happened after World War I?
From the Treasury Department, Henry Morgenthau again memorably offered his ideas: he wanted to see Germany divided into small states, then turned into a primarily agrarian, pastoral nation, devoid of heavy industry, with its coal mines closed and its factories dismantled, and in this way it would be incapable of waging future wars. Churchill was initially resistant, but by the second day he signed on, as did an enthusiastic Roosevelt. The president hotly told Stimson: “The German people as a whole must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless campaign against the decency of modern civilization.” Still, when news of the plan reached Washington after a series of press leaks, an uproar followed. Stimson at the War Department and Hull at the State Department were aghast. It was, Stimson said, “Semitism gone wild,” and Hull thought it would guarantee resistance of the bitter-enders, those Germans who would fight to the last. Republicans jumped on the plan as a possible campaign attack, and Roosevelt promptly abandoned it. Within two weeks, he was stating that he had “no idea” how the plan could have been initiated.
Was this Roosevelt’s masterly sleight of hand? Was he covering his tracks? Was it a further indication of his dwindling health? Churchill, who had himself just recovered from pneumonia, was so worried during the summit that he sought out Dr. McIntire to ask about the president. McIntire insisted Roosevelt was fine. But one of Churchill’s aides, his physician Lord Moran, noted, “You could have put your fist between his neck and his collar—and I said to myself then that men at his time of life do not go thin all of a sudden just for nothing.”
As the two leaders were leaving Quebec, there were new reports of mounting German resistance. The prediction that only twelve weeks remained until the war’s end was now nothing more than an illusion.
After Quebec, there was a brief visit by the Churchills to Hyde Park. The prime minister kept his usual owlish hours and both leaders stayed up until 1 a.m. But when the Churchills had departed, Roosevelt took to his bed at 7 p.m. with strict instructions not to be awoken until the morning.
Meanwhile, Thomas Dewey was basing his campaign on his accusation that the U.S. government was being run by “tired old men.” For many, it was hard to disagree with that assessment.
Roosevelt knew that he had to change the tenor and the direction of his own campaign. And he had less than eight weeks to do it.
THE NEW STATLER HOTEL was a popular destination during the last years of World War II. It was the place for conventions, ceremonial dinners, and speeches; the place where “plaques were awarded, backs were slapped and hands shaken.” Located at 1001 Sixteenth Street, it was only a few blocks from the White House, and it had been specifically designed with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in mind. The Presidential Room had a spacious secure elevator to the mezzanine level, and a special entrance from the street to the massive elevator itself. Indeed, a presidential limousine could drive directly into the elevator and be “lifted” inside the hotel. Then, in complete privacy, the president could be carried from his car, transferred to his wheelchair, and whisked to a head table, out of sight from the watchful eyes of the press corps or anyone else. Not unsurprisingly, groups planning a dinner and expecting the president of the United States to attend went out of their way to reserve the Presidential Room at the Statler.
So it was that the Teamsters Union would hold a banquet at the Statler on September 23, 1944, and Franklin Roosevelt would be there to give the address.
After the nearly disastrous outing at Bremerton, the stakes for this speech were very high. The night before it, the president doggedly practiced using his braces—Sam Rosenman poignantly recalled, “He was literally trying to learn to walk again.”—Roosevelt leaned against Dr. McIntire, but his emaciated limbs could barely support him, and it soon became clear that the only way Roosevelt could make the speech was sitting in his wheelchair.
The room was packed and the crowd was primed. As Roosevelt was introduced, his daughter, Anna, asked Rosenman in a hushed voice, “Do you think Pa will pull it over?” Throughout the hall, hundreds of burly unionists and Washington bureaucrats and activists slid back their seats “from their dinner tables” and waited. FDR began, slightly discordantly, but slowly warming to the speech with each word. “You know,” he joked, drawing out the syllables for emphasis, “I am actually four years older, which is a fact that seems to an-noy some people.” He continued, “In fact, in the mathematical field there are millions of Americans who are more” (another drawn-out word) “than eleven” (heavy emphasis) “years older than when we started to clear up the mess that was dumped into our laps in 1933.” The room erupted, and Roosevelt, like a comedian after delivering a punch line, sat back.
It was a speech to the faithful, deriding Republicans who attacked labor for three and a half years and then embraced it in the few months before an election. He called his opponent “a fraud,” and added, “We have all seen many ma
rvelous stunts in the circus but no performing elephant could turn a hand-spring without falling flat on its back.” And he noted, “If I were a Republican leader speaking to a mixed audience, the last word in the whole dictionary that I think I would use is that word ‘depression.’ ” Roosevelt was in full swing and the crowd was transfixed. There were huzzahs, there was laughter, and one excited teamster began to beat a silver tray with a soup ladle. “The old master still had it,” wrote a reporter for Time magazine. “He was like a veteran virtuoso playing a piece he had loved for years. . . . The President was playing what he loves to play—politics.”
And the final barb was yet to come: Roosevelt powered through to the crescendo: “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks—on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now attack my little dog, Fala. Well of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but”—a brief pause—“Fala does resent them.” Roosevelt added, “I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.” That one evening was like magic, erasing months of speculation and returning the Roosevelt of old to the spotlight. But Dewey continued to press his case, and Roosevelt knew he needed to score an additional blow to have a real chance at a knockout. The blow would be a tour of New York City. The date was Saturday, October 21.
MEANWHILE, ON OCTOBER 2, the Polish underground army surrendered in Warsaw. About 200,000 Poles had died in the uprising; some wounded insurgents were burned alive in field hospitals by the advancing Germans. About 55,000 Poles were sent to concentration camps, and another 150,000 were transported to forced labor camps in Germany. The Germans reported 26,000 casualties: killed, wounded, or missing. In the following weeks, widespread looting began. As in the Soviet Union, the Nazis exacted vengeance. All raw materials, fine clothes, and even dining-room tables remaining in the embattled city were to be transported out; what was still left was to be leveled or demolished, either by fire or by specially placed German bombs.
THE SPECIAL PRESIDENTIAL TRAIN from Washington pulled into New York at 7 a.m. Roosevelt was slated to tour four boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and, of course, Manhattan—in an open car with the top down. New York, however, was being drenched by the remnants of a hurricane. Streets were flooded; sidewalks and buildings were soaked. There was a cold, driving rain. Nevertheless, Roosevelt was determined not to change his plans. He began in Brooklyn with a stop at Ebbets Field, where, in his braces, he arduously made his way to a lectern behind second base, affirming his allegiance to the Dodgers and praising Senator Bob Wagner. The rain continued to fall in sheets as Roosevelt stood, his legs in the grip of his braces, his glasses fogged, and his hair matted to his head. Afterward, the soaked, shivering president got an improvised massage and warm clothes from a Coast Guard motor pool.
Then the tour continued, despite Dr. McIntire’s strenuous pleas, with the car’s top down. More than anyone else, Roosevelt knew what the crowds had come to see. They wanted a glimpse of a vibrant president, smiling even as his shirt was plastered to his outstretched arm by the pounding rain. It spilled off his fedora and ran in rivulets down his face. His suit was soaked. But the president, his adrenaline flowing, happily continued smiling and waving, and the people, gazing out from beneath their umbrellas, roared in reply. By mid-afternoon, the ride was over. A tired but ecstatic Roosevelt made his way to Eleanor’s apartment on Washington Square, where Dr. McIntire suggested a shot of bourbon to warm up the shivering president. Roosevelt had three. It was his first visit to his wife’s New York City home. She gave him a brief tour, pointing out that there were no stairs and that two rooms connected by a bath could be shut off from the rest of the apartment, in case he ever wanted to stay. In the afternoon, Roosevelt, finally dry, took a nap. Then he eased into a hot bath. That night, at the Waldorf Astoria, he was to address two thousand members of the Foreign Policy Association.
Roosevelt used the speech to once again muster support for a Council of the United Nations and to describe it as an organization that was central to his vision for a postwar world. After ad-libbing a story about how far U.S.-Soviet relations had advanced, he stated unequivocally that peacekeeping was to be a central tenet. “Peace, like war, can succeed only where there is a will to enforce it and where there is available power to enforce it,” he insisted. The council “must have the power to act quickly and decisively to keep the peace by force, if necessary.” Roosevelt then used one of his favorite techniques, the homespun analogy: “A policeman would not be a very effective policeman if, when he saw a felon break into a house, he had to go to the Town Hall and call a town meeting to issue a warrant before the felon could be arrested. So to my simple mind it is clear that, if the world organization is to have any reality at all, our American representative must be endowed in advance by the people themselves, by constitutional means through their representatives in the Congress, with authority to act.” The crowd gave Roosevelt a standing ovation and overwhelming cheers. Below him, on a special track, his train was waiting to carry him to Hyde Park.
Roosevelt’s aide, Hassett, noted that after the day with adoring crowds, “The President is in the pink of condition this morning. No trace of a cold, not even a sniffle,” while Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had taken to his bed, and many of the Secret Service agents were sick. “Not so the Boss. He’s madder than hell, his Dutch is up, and nothing will stop him now.” Hassett added, “All my own fears and misgivings about the President’s health . . . vanished like the morning dew.”
Roosevelt made three more major stops: another ride in an open car through Philadelphia; a speech at Soldier Field in Chicago, with 100,000 people listening inside and another 100,000 outside, fighting against a cold lake wind; and Fenway Park in Boston. The speech at Fenway Park was to be his last major address, the concluding capstone of his political career. Four years earlier, he had promised America’s mothers that he would keep their sons out of “foreign wars.” Now he spoke of how Americans of all ethnicities and creeds were fighting together “all over the world.” And he noted that “any real, red-blooded American” would have chosen to fight “when our own soil was made the object of a sneak attack.” The crowd applauded, and Roosevelt basked in the campaign spotlight for a final time.
The next day, he would make the rounds near Hyde Park and deliver one more campaign radio address to the nation. Then there was nothing left to do but perform the usual ritual: sit at the dining table and tabulate the election results. Tally sheets were placed at the seats, pencils were arranged on tables, and cider and doughnuts were served. In staccato bursts, the big radio and the news tickers began to report. Neighbors came by to cheer the president at 11 p.m. and Roosevelt, sitting on the portico, greeted them as a photographer caught the moment for posterity. The president’s voluminous cape was draped over the sides of his chair to cover the wheels. His trousers hung in deep folds from his crossed legs, and one ankle was clearly visible. The ankle was also clearly swollen, bulging out over his shoe, a sign of pooling blood and a failing heart. Beneath his fedora, his eyes were rimmed with gray, and the skin below them looked almost bruised; his weary face also looked pinched and hollow. But the jubilant crowd did not see what the photograph saw. And Roosevelt would not succumb, not that night. He waited up until after 3 a.m., when it was clear that the nation was going his way. He would be president of the United States for an unprecedented fourth term.
Dewey made his concession statement at 3:16, and Roosevelt readied himself for bed around four o’clock. Hassett strolled over to his boss to say good night, and the president gave his last pronouncement on the evening: “I still think he is a son-of-a-bitch.”
WHILE HITLER WAS LEAVING his headquarters at Wolf’s Lair for the last time and boarding a train for Berlin, in Washington, D.C., thirty thousand people waited outside Union Station under a torrential rain for Roosevelt to return, victorious, from Hyde Park. Here, as during that fateful campaign day in New York, the president insisted
that his car top be down. His outgoing vice president, Henry Wallace, and his incoming vice president, Harry Truman, wedged themselves into the car along with him. Roosevelt’s young grandson, Johnnie Boettiger, rode in the front. A band played; police motorcycles led the escort. Along the route to the White House, the crowds swelled to 300,000, including federal employees and schoolchildren who had been given the day off to welcome the president back. The electoral votes were decisive: 432 to 99 for Roosevelt—although the difference in the popular vote was only 3.6 million out of 48 million, the narrowest reelection since Woodrow Wilson’s in 1916. Still, the president had a wealth of new allies in Congress, where leading conservatives and isolationists had been turned out of office. It was, for the president, as much a referendum on his sweeping vision of a postwar world governed by a United Nations as it was a victory for him personally.
But as buoyant as the day’s spirit was, as much as Roosevelt felt free to laugh with the newsman who asked if he would run again in 1948, there was an undercurrent of unease. Although the president’s blood pressure had actually dropped when he was on the campaign trail feeding off the adulation of the crowds, and although an exam two weeks after the vote found clear lungs, good heart sounds, and a blood pressure of 210/112, Roosevelt was tired. His appetite was withering, and his skin was chalkier and far grayer. And neither the war nor the peace was fully won.
FOR THE ALLIED ARMIES crossing France and the Low Countries, there was no blitzkrieg equivalent against the Germans. After the German Seventh Army was destroyed at Normandy, an SS panzer division in the south retaliated by massacring the entire town of Oradour-sur-Glâne. For now, Allied forces, despite having thirty-seven divisions, over 7,500 tanks, 6,000 bombers, 5,000 fighters, and 2,000 transport aircraft, lacked a major port. Nearly every bit of ammunition, every drop of fuel, every spare part, and every can of food had to be off-loaded in Normandy. This difficult supply line, combined with the continuing shafts of German resistance as Allied forces drew closer to the border, dashed hopes for an immediate end to the war; actually, interviews with young captured German officers revealed that they still fancifully believed in an eventual victory for the Nazis. Even in Italy, the Germans still clung on, holding two Allied armies at bay. And the Führer, when he wasn’t directing fictional armies that didn’t exist, had a plan for the ones that did: wait until bad weather set in, lay a trap for the advancing enemy forces, and watch the U.S.-British alliance with Stalin crack.