Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 12, 1995 TAG: 9504120068
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL BROWNING KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: WARM SPRINGS, GA. LENGTH: Long
This was the last of Earth that Franklin Delano Roosevelt ever knew, this smiling spring landscape of oaks and pines and hickory trees, with dogwoods blossoming in white, fragrant sprays beneath the blue skies of Georgia.
Fifty years ago today, the man who led the United States from the depths of the Depression, across the fiery gulf of World War II, into broad, sunlit uplands of unrivaled power and prosperity, died quietly at his desk here, in a small six-room house of brick and long-leaf pine: the only house he ever owned himself.
Now, when the New Deal seems to have run its course, and government aid programs are under assault from all sides, there will be commemorations and speeches here today by Vice President Al Gore, Georgia Gov. Zell Miller, historian Arthur Schlesinger and Roosevelt's own granddaughter, Anna. All will be hard-put to eclipse the final pen-scrawled words of Roosevelt's last speech, scheduled for Jefferson Day and never delivered:
``Let us move forward with a strong and active faith.''
This was his valedictory to the American people, written at Warm Springs shortly before he died at 3:35 p.m., on an afternoon indelibly fixed in memory for any American old enough to hear and understand the news.
``He was the one person I knew, anywhere, who was never afraid,'' said a tear-choked congressman from Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson, shortly after hearing of FDR's death.
``We've had it too easy all this time, because we knew he was there,'' said a stricken aide, Harry Hopkins, after Roosevelt's funeral.
``Whatever we thought was the matter with the world, whatever we felt ought to be done about it, we could take our ideas to him, and if he thought there was any merit in them, or if anything that we said got him started on a train of thought of his own, then we'd see him go ahead and do it. And no matter how tremendous it might be or how idealistic, he wasn't scared of it.''
Roosevelt's faith, his ebullient optimism and courage, still linger in memory and draw more than 135,000 visitors a year to the Little White House at Warm Springs. No gloomy pall of death overhangs the spot; FDR had too much fun here.
Instead the Warm Springs site radiates an aura of joyous good humor, of glad days spent fishing and swimming and horseback riding, of Sunday barbecues at Dowdell's Knob and long drives in the country, of evenings that began with a rattle of the pewter cocktail shaker, went on to good food and table-talk, and ended with a book chosen from the library beside the fireplace.
From the moment in 1924 when he first lowered himself into the mineral-rich waters that still flow abundantly year-round at a constant 88 degrees Fahrenheit and discovered he could stand buoyantly on his polio-paralyzed legs, the president prized his weeks at Warm Springs.
But it was a haggard, limp Roosevelt who was carried off the train in Warm Springs the afternoon of March 30, 1945. The recent conference at Yalta, in the Crimea, had used up his last reserves of strength.
People said his skin looked translucent, his eyes bigger and more shadowed underneath. The train to Warm Springs was under orders to proceed slowly, because bumps and curves were excruciating to the 63-year-old president, who had no more cushioning muscles or flesh on his emaciated lower frame.
Joining him in Warm Springs were four women of whom he was fond: an old sweetheart, Lucy Mercer Rutherford, with whom he had had an affair while he was assistant secretary of the Navy; two cousins, Margaret Suckley and Laura Delano; and Elizabeth Shoumatoff, an artist who would paint the last portrait of Franklin Roosevelt done from life.
The president seemed to rally at Warm Springs, but was still enfeebled. His last evening alive he read ``The Punch and Judy Murders,'' by John Dickson Carr. He left it lying open to page 78, the beginning of a chapter ominously titled ``Six Feet of Earth.''
The next morning dawned bright and sunny. Roosevelt took breakfast in bed and read the latest war news in the Atlanta Constitution. The U.S. 9th Army had reached the Elbe River and was within 57 miles of Berlin.
At 11 a.m. Roosevelt dressed and began his sitting for Shoumatoff's portrait. He was in a good humor, signing documents and handing them to secretary Bill Hassett, who hung them around the room on furniture, to let FDR's inked signature dry.
Roosevelt raised his left hand to his temple, slid it around to his forehead and squeezed. The hand then flopped down ungracefully.
``I have a terrific headache,'' the president replied softly. They were his last words. His head slumped down and lolled to the left. His jaw sagged open. He lost consciousness.
The president had suffered a stroke, a burst blood vessel in his brain, extinguishing consciousness in a pool of personal night.
His blood pressure was increasing, a common symptom in stroke victims. The heart, compensating for the drop in pressure caused by the leaking blood, begins to beat harder and faster.
He lingered unconscious through the afternoon. There never really was any hope.
Roosevelt died at 3:35 p.m. From the small house at Warm Springs the news spread across the globe. At 5:47 p.m. the International News Service teletypist, Charles Sparkenbaugh, pressed his bell four times and typed the shortest bulletin in wire history:
FLASH
WASHN - FDR DEAD.
INS WASHN 4/12/547PPH36
In London Winston Churchill was given the news. ``I felt as if I had been struck a physical blow,'' he remembered later.
In Berlin, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels burst into Adolf Hitler's gloomy subterranean Fuehrerbunker and exclaimed: ``My Fuehrer! I congratulate you! Roosevelt is dead!'' A thunderstruck Vice President Harry Truman took the oath of office at 7:08 p.m.
As the funeral train left Warm Springs, a Life magazine photographer snapped a picture of Graham Jackson, a black accordionist, playing ``Going Home,'' his face crumpled with grief and streaked with tears.
On the long, slow train ride back to Washington, United Press correspondent Merriman Smith looked out the window at Gainesville, Ga. In a distant field, black female sharecroppers were on their knees, weeping and praying, their arms outstretched to the passing train.
``He made a way for folks when there wasn't no way,'' said an elderly Georgia black man, Nelson Waters.
During Roosevelt's funeral in Washington, at 4 p.m. Sunday, America stopped. Radios broadcast empty air. Telephones went dead; there wasn't even a dial tone. Teletype machines ceased their chatter, then slowly tapped out seven letters:
SILENCE.
New York City's 505 subway trains halted enroute. In Times Square a policeman blew his whistle and two trolley cars stopped dead. Their passengers rose and bared their heads. War production paused for two minutes at factories across the country.
The following day Roosevelt was buried at Hyde Park, N.Y.
In the living room of FDR's Warm Springs home - opened as a shrine and museum in 1947 - are FDR's oval table and chair in which he was sitting when the stroke overtook him. Across the room is the now-famous ``Last Portrait,'' by Shoumatoff, still unfinished.
There is a watery shimmer to it. The president looks old, thin, yet resolute. The ghostly effect of its unfinished lines is heightened by the knowledge that Roosevelt lost consciousness beneath the artist's gaze. The eyes that look at you from the painting would never open again after that morning.
by CNB