AT 9:30 a.m. on April 12, Franklin Roosevelt lay in his bed in his vacation cottage in rural Warm Springs, Georgia, with a breakfast tray and a copy of the morning’s Atlanta Constitution, the area’s local paper. His usual newspapers—the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Post—had been held up in the mail pouch from Washington. And so he was perusing the Atlanta paper when, outside his bedroom door, he heard loud laughter. He recognized the voice of his maid Lizzie McDuffie and called out her name. She appeared shyly in his doorway, apologizing for making so much noise.
“Oh no, no,” said the president. “But what in the world were you laughing about?” With his back propped up on a pillow, Roosevelt tilted his head and looked down his nose through his round spectacles, his familiar conversational gaze.
“Well, Mr. Roosevelt,” Lizzie said, “do you believe in reincarnation?”
“Do I believe in what?”
“Reincarnation.”
The president thought for a moment, quietly considering the afterlife. Then he did what he so often did in his press conferences: turned the question on its asker, without revealing his feelings on the matter. “Well tell me, do you believe in reincarnation?”
“I don’t know if I do or not,” the maid said. “But in case there is such a thing, when I come back I want to be a canary bird.”
McDuffie remembered this moment vividly. “He looked at me from head to foot—I weighed about two hundred pounds then—and he burst out into peals of laughter . . . He looked at how fat I was and said, ‘A canary bird!’”
The maid thought Roosevelt was looking healthier on the morning of April 12 than he had of late. But then, she thought, he always looked his best in the morning. He seemed to age impossibly quickly as each day passed, as if the clock inside him was moving too fast.
Roosevelt had arrived in Warm Springs two weeks earlier, on March 29, for a long rest. His cottage was situated near pools of natural spring water where victims of paralysis had come for years to bathe in hopes of soothing the symptoms of polio and other diseases, and there was a hospital nearby where patients received medical care. This hospital was one of the few places where Roosevelt would allow the public to see him in his wheelchair, for he believed he could lift these patients’ spirits by rolling out from behind the façade that hid his disability from the rest of the world. He had first come to Warm Springs in 1924, hoping for some miracle cure for his polio, a miracle that had never come. But he loved the place, so he built a six-room white cottage with four colonnades out front in 1933 (the year he took office) and visited often with his dog, Fala, to recuperate from the stress of his job. All the rooms were on one floor, easily maneuvered by wheelchair. Due to the white paint and the colonnades out front, the cottage became known as “the Little White House.”
Now sixty-three years old, Roosevelt had led the nation through the Great Depression and World War II, achieving a new kind of presidential iconography. He had become almost a paternal figure for the American public; he had served as chief executive for so long, many soldiers fighting in the military could not remember any other president during their lifetimes. “There were times,” White House chief of staff Admiral William Leahy wrote, “when I felt that if I could find anybody except Roosevelt who knew what America wanted, it would be an astonishing discovery.”
The responsibilities of the presidency were crushing. After 4,422 days in office, Roosevelt had found it difficult to maintain his energy. He suffered hypertension and heart disease, not to mention chronic sinus pain. He was losing weight alarmingly. Privately, the president’s doctor, Admiral Ross McIntire, had described his condition as “God-awful.” On the night before his chat about reincarnation with his maid Lizzie, Roosevelt had dined with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau in the Little White House. Morgenthau and Roosevelt had been friends for years.
“I was terribly shocked when I saw him,” Morgenthau described that dinner. “I found he had aged terrifically and looked very haggard. His hands shook so that he started to knock over glasses. I had to hold each glass as he poured out the cocktail . . . I have never seen him have so much difficulty transferring himself from his wheelchair to his regular chair, and I was in agony watching him.”
The president’s martinis—an alchemy for which he took great pride—revived him, and Morgenthau noted that FDR had partaken of the caviar with zest.
Now, the next morning, Roosevelt lay in his bed awaiting the mail pouch to come in from the White House, so the day’s business could get under way. In the afternoon he planned to attend a barbecue that locals and White House correspondents were throwing for him, in the village of Warm Springs. Already, suckling pigs were sizzling over an open fire, and secret service agents were scoping out the terrain. It was just the kind of thing the president needed to boost his spirits.
“Oh, I don’t feel any too good this morning, Lizzie,” the president told his maid. He touched the back of his head, complaining of a headache.
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An alarming entanglement in world affairs confronted the president during his stay at Warm Springs—a development he had kept secret from the American people. Relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had taken an abrupt and dangerous turn.
For the past four years, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Roosevelt had forged a most unlikely partnership, waging war together to defeat the Axis powers. Churchill had famously named this partnership “the Grand Alliance.” As grand as it was, it joined as allies the Soviets and Americans, two nations with gravely contrasting political ideologies. The relationship between the United States and the USSR was so complex, the State Department’s filing cabinets were jammed tightly with position papers, few in agreement.
The United States, under Roosevelt’s direction, had opened its first embassy in Moscow in 1934, establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union for the first time. In the next few years State Department staff in Moscow had witnessed the Great Purge—the bizarre disappearance and subsequent murder of so-called dissidents in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s orders. Many of these victims, it seemed, were innocent of any crime. The Soviet dictator was intent on rooting out the slightest hint of political challenge, and paranoia gripped a populace of some 170 million people. “The purge was everywhere,” remembered the Moscow embassy’s Charles Bohlen. “The number of arrests, exiles, and executions would eventually reach 9 to 10 million—the figure now generally accepted . . . I found no evidence for a conclusion that [Stalin] was mentally unbalanced in the usual sense of the term, although obviously there must have been something wrong with a man who would send millions of people to senseless deaths.”
George Kennan, another young diplomat among the first wave of Americans at the Moscow embassy, came to the following conclusion: “Never—neither then nor at any later date—did I consider the Soviet Union a fit ally or associate, actual or potential, for this country.”*
When the United States entered World War II, however, the Allies had accepted Stalin’s partnership, as he supplied millions of Red Army troops to fight the Nazis—far more, in fact, than the United States or Britain. The U.S. State Department’s first official memo on this subject shot straight to the heart of the matter: “In the opinion of this Government . . . any defense against Hitlerism, any rallying of the forces opposing Hitlerism, from whatever source these forces may spring, will hasten the eventual downfall of the present German leaders, and will therefore redound to the benefit of our own defense and security.” Or, as Churchill put it, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
The first U.S. ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt, had warned that Stalin’s intentions would ultimately conflict with the Americans’. “Stalin’s aim is to spread the power of communists to the end of the earth,” Bullitt cabled Roosevelt in August 1943. “Stalin, like Hitler, will not stop. He can only be stopped.”
Roosevelt believed that the United States and the Soviet Union would emerge from the war as close allies. “I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man . . . He won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace,” Roosevelt had told Bullitt. “It’s my responsibility and not yours, and I’m going to play my hunch.”
Now, in April 1945, with victory in Europe in sight, a disagreement had caused a potential break between the Americans and Soviets. It appeared that the president had been wrong about Stalin. A ping-pong of cables across the Atlantic between Roosevelt and Stalin formulated the first direct wartime confrontation between the two leaders and the two nations.
The problems began just after the last meeting of the Big Three—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, at Yalta in February 1945—where the three leaders formulated military strategy to end Nazi resistance and to map out postwar Europe. FDR had returned from that conference reporting terrific optimism. “The far reaching decisions we took at Yalta,” he cabled Stalin, “will hasten victory and the establishment of a firm foundation for a lasting peace.” Right after Yalta, however, the new ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, began to raise red flags in his Washington communiqués. The mood in Moscow had shifted suddenly and darkly, as if by a switch.
The most immediate issue was the fate of Poland. The Soviets had installed a puppet regime in Poland, which the Red Army had recently liberated from the Nazis. At Yalta the Soviets had agreed that Poland would hold free elections “in about one month” to create its own democratic government representative of the people—according to the rules governed by Yalta’s Declaration on Liberated Europe, which Joseph Stalin had signed. Those elections never occurred. In fact, Poland’s government was a thinly veiled Sovietized regime controlled by Stalin himself. Moscow ambassador Harriman believed that hundreds if not thousands of American war prisoners were stranded in Poland, and U.S. officials were barred from getting inside to inquire about their condition. The Soviets would not allow it.
“I am outraged,” Harriman cabled Roosevelt on March 14, 1945, two weeks before the president arrived at the Little White House in Warm Springs.
Two days later Churchill cabled the president: “At present, all entry into Poland is barred to our representatives . . . An impenetrable veil has been drawn across the scene . . . There is no doubt in my mind that the Soviets fear very much our seeing what is going on in Poland.”
Stalin had agreed at Yalta to allow the United States to set up military bases in Hungary. Now he went back on his promise and was refusing to allow American representatives into the territory. Then came news that two of Stalin’s deputies had entered Romania and had ousted Romania’s leader. King Michael was given two hours and five minutes to inform the Romanian people that their political leader, General R˘adescu, would be replaced by a man more friendly to the Russian government, Petru Groza. Meanwhile, all American planes in Soviet-controlled territory had been grounded.
The Soviets’ domination of eastern European countries threatened the very ideology that American and British soldiers had fought and died for during this war. “I feel certain that unless we do take action in cases of this kind,” Ambassador Harriman cabled Roosevelt, “the Soviet Government will become convinced that they can force us to accept any of their decisions on all matters and it will be increasingly difficult to stop their aggressive policy.”
On March 29, the day Roosevelt arrived at Warm Springs, he cabled Stalin. “I cannot conceal from you the concern with which I view the developments of mutual interest since our fruitful meetings at Yalta,” Roosevelt communicated. “I must make it quite plain to you that any solution which would result in a thinly disguised continuance of the present Warsaw regime would be unacceptable and would cause the people of the United States to regard the Yalta agreements as having failed.”
The Soviet dictator refused any compromise. His puppet government in Poland would remain. “Matters on the Polish question,” Stalin cabled Roosevelt, “have really reached a dead end.” Then Stalin made a stunning allegation, that the Anglo-American forces had attempted to negotiate a surrender with the Nazis without Russian participation, at a meeting Stalin claimed had occurred in Berne, Switzerland. This would enable, he claimed, Anglo-American forces to march into Nazi-occupied territory unharmed on the western front, while the Nazis continued to fight and kill Soviet troops on the eastern front. The Americans, Stalin believed, had betrayed their Russian allies.
Roosevelt assured Stalin that no such negotiations had taken place, but Stalin refused to believe it.* “It may be assumed that you have not been fully informed,” Stalin cabled Roosevelt on April 3. “As a result of this at the present moment the Germans on the Western front in fact have ceased the war against England and the United States. At the same time they continue the war with Russia.” (This claim was obviously false.) The situation, Stalin wrote, had caused “an atmosphere of fear and distrust” between the Soviets and the Americans.
The president responded with a furious cable two days later. “I have received with astonishment your message of April 3,” he communicated. “I have told you that . . . no negotiations were held at Berne . . . It is astonishing that a belief seems to have reached the Soviet Government that I have entered into an agreement with the enemy without first obtaining your full agreement . . . Frankly I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”
Over the next few days the tension softened. Roosevelt attempted to end the feud graciously. “There must not, in any event, be mutual distrust and minor misunderstandings of this character . . . in the future,” he wrote Stalin. Privately, he had come to a grave conclusion. “Averell [Harriman] is right,” Roosevelt said of his Moscow ambassador. “We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.”
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Nothing like this had ever occurred—such outspoken vitriol between the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States. And the turning of events had occurred with frightening alacrity. Two months earlier, at the end of the Yalta Conference, America felt a glow of optimism, specifically with regard to United States–Soviet relations. “We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for and talking about for so many years,” professed Harry Hopkins, arguably Roosevelt’s closest friend and aide. “We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of the peace—and by ‘we,’ I mean all of us, the whole civilized human race.”
Just two months later, all the security that American and British officials felt regarding the Soviets had vanished. Stalin’s victories over the Nazis in eastern Europe had empowered him as never before. As Churchill described the mood in April 1945: “The two months that had passed since then [Yalta] had seen tremendous changes cutting to the very roots of thought . . . The whole relationship of Russia with the western Allies was in flux. Every question about the future was unsettled between us. The agreements and understandings at Yalta, such as they were, had already been broken or brushed aside by the triumphant Kremlin. New perils, perhaps as terrible as those we had surmounted, loomed and glared upon the torn and harassed world.”
Americans were aware of this turning of events, but only of the surface details reported in their newspapers. A majority of them had long since placed their faith in their president to surmount such problems. In the future, many historians would look back on the Roosevelt presidency and find his greatest fault to be his failure to brief his vice president on the critical shift in global affairs, for Roosevelt would not live to see this narrative play out.
Just before noon on April 12, crusty and bespectacled Bill Hassett, the president’s correspondence secretary, arrived at Roosevelt’s cottage with the White House mail pouch. By this time Roosevelt was sitting in his wheelchair by a crackling fire. He was cold, even though the morning had ushered in an unseasonably warm Georgia spring day. He wore a gray blazer and a vest over his red Harvard tie, and he was holding court with three women. There were his cousins Margaret “Daisy” Suckley and Laura Delano. The third was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, a widow and an old flame of FDR’s (Mrs. Roosevelt was unaware of Rutherfurd’s presence in the cottage).
Hassett began to pass Roosevelt papers from the pouch. Here was a State Department document that required his signature. “A typical State Department letter,” Roosevelt said mockingly. “It says nothing at all.” When Hassett handed the president Senate Bill 298 (which would increase the borrowing power of the Commodity Credit Corporation), Roosevelt smiled at his female guests. “Here’s where I make law,” he said. He placed the document on a card table and wrote “Approved” along with the date and his signature.
As he signed documents, Hassett spread them out on a table so the ink would dry. Roosevelt’s transportation secretary, Dewey Long, appeared, attempting to get the president’s attention regarding travel logistics for an upcoming conference in San Francisco. The conference was to be a crowning moment for Roosevelt, as dignitaries from all over the globe would soon be arriving to try to hammer out agreements for a new world peace organization called the United Nations. The conference was set to open in thirteen days, on April 25, and Roosevelt had already begun work on the speech he intended to give. FDR had no patience for travel logistics, focusing instead on the pile of documents requiring his attention.
Among these documents was a top-secret cable from his Moscow ambassador, Averell Harriman, regarding the president’s communiqué to Stalin from the day before. Harriman had held up this cable to Stalin and was now suggesting a rewording. He objected to the word minor in the following statement: “There must not, in any event, be mutual distrust and minor misunderstandings of this character . . . in the future.”
“May I respectfully suggest that the word ‘minor’ as a qualification of ‘misunderstandings’ be eliminated,” Harriman wrote Roosevelt. “I must confess that the misunderstanding appeared to me of major character and the use of the word ‘minor’ might well be misinterpreted here.”
Harriman’s cable had arrived in Roosevelt’s hands with a suggested reply written by White House chief of staff Admiral Leahy, which was normal procedure. Leahy had grown adept at speaking for the president, after years of close service and friendship. His suggested reply read: “I do not wish to delete the word ‘minor’ as it is my desire to consider the misunderstanding a minor matter.” Roosevelt wrote the word “Approved” on the suggested reply to Stalin and handed the cable off to be sent.
At around twelve thirty a portrait artist appeared at the cottage’s front door. Elizabeth Shoumatoff, a tall fifty-six-year-old Ukraine-born artist with striking brown eyes and hair, had been invited to paint FDR. The president moved himself from his wheelchair to a high-backed leather chair for the sake of the portrait. Shoumatoff set up her easel. As she began to sketch, she engaged the president in light conversation, so she could study the contours of his moving face. Some servants were setting a nearby table for the president’s lunch service. Roosevelt turned to Shoumatoff and said (as she recalled), “Now we’ve got just about fifteen more minutes to work,” after which the artist would be asked to leave.
Roosevelt’s eyes remained focused on his paperwork. In the chair next to him, his cousin Daisy Suckley was crocheting. His other cousin Laura Delano was filling vases with flowers. The portrait artist observed the president closely: “He was so absorbed in the material before him that I didn’t dare ask him to look up.” FDR slipped a cigarette into his cigarette holder and lit it, then he lifted his left hand to his temple and began rubbing his forehead. He uttered a sentence so quietly, no one but Miss Suckley heard it, not even the artist Shoumatoff, sitting about six feet away.
“I have a terrific headache,” he said.
Then he lost consciousness, his head tipping lifelessly forward. Panicked, Suckley turned to Shoumatoff: “Ask the Secret Service man to call a doctor immediately.”