Joseph Lelyveld - His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt

Campaigning in Poughkeepsie, New York, on the final evening of his final campaign.

W ITH EACH PASSING DAY , he extended his record as the longest-serving president in American history. As Franklin Roosevelt entered his twelfth year in office, he was a more seasoned, astute, and, sometimes, cynical reader of political mood swings than any mere two-term president. By the start of 1944, as yet another election year rolled around, hed outlived, exhausted, or distanced the few political advisers on whom hed relied (and even these had usually been left wondering about his intentions). Anyone was free now to float a guess about whether hed stand for another term, based on his track record or the global crisis or both, neither of which suggested he might not. But no one could claim to know for sure. Cagey by nature, an inveterate hoarder of contradictory options in statecraft and politics, the president himself was the only political adviser he would heed when he deemed the time for decision was upon him. Those who saw him up close searched his countenance for signs of weariness and ill health. He met them with his usual charm, his practiced chattiness. Only in private, confiding in his worshipful distant cousin Daisy Suckley, who spent more time alone with him than did his bustling wife, Eleanor, would he acknowledge how very weary he felt. He just is too tired, too often, Daisy had written in her diary the previous October.

With the most destructive military struggle in human history approaching its climax, there was no one in the White House, or his party, or the whole of political Washington, who dared stand before him in the early months of 1944 and ask face-to-face for a clear answer to the question of whether he could contemplate stepping down. All the memoirs, diaries, and caches of private letters preserved from that time reveal no such encounter. When reporters tried to insinuate this by now perennial question into his twice-weekly press conference performances, where in the pretelevision era direct quotation was usually barred, they knew they were inviting a jocular brush-off. Youre getting picayune. Were not talking about that now, the president had said in a characteristically airy response at his last such session in 1943. On that, they could quote him if they wished. Usually, they would just summarize what he said in their own words, which he might later disown, or describe his mood or appearance.

Cabinet members attempting to extract a hint of his political plans in strictest confidence, even a wink, from members of the First Family were told by his nearest and dearest that they were completely in the dark. So Anna, the presidents only daughter and eldest child, the offspring in whom hed be most likely to confide, told Harold Ickes, the interior secretary. When an aide passed along the news that the Democratic National Committee had endorsed him for a fourth term, Roosevelts entire comment was an uninflected, perfectly indifferent Oh. Even Harry Hopkins, his supposed alter ego and diplomatic point man, the one messenger whod been able to represent his thinking with absolute certitude to Churchill or Stalinhis Rasputin, some commentators and even some Democrats called himseemed at a loss. Hopkins, whod been sidelined after a collapse at the start of the year, was more obviously ill than his boss. Open me up, he quipped, as he was being wheeled into an operating theater at the Mayo Clinic late in March 1944 for major intestinal surgery that would keep him out of action until July. Maybe youll find the answer to the fourth term. Maybe not.

Only once in the written record of that time does Franklin Roosevelt commit to paper a statement of his own feelings. It came in response to a somewhat tentative, nonetheless daring, eight-page memo from Ben Cohen, a long-serving New Deal legal draftsman and political strategist of unquestioned loyalty. Intended for the presidents eyes only, Cohens memo offered a pessimistic diagnosis of the state of the Roosevelt coalition and the prospects for an effective fourth term in the aftermath of the war, even assuming his reelection. In restrained lawyerly language, Cohen is warning his president that another term could be a failure, a barren anticlimax, a political train wreck, due to grievances and bitter antipathies that had accumulated over the years in Congress and the sclerotic administrations own ranks; such a failure, Cohen warned, could mean that Rooseveltian ideas, like Wilsonian ideas, may be discredited for a considerable period (Rooseveltian, in this context, being synonymous with liberal). The mere mention of Woodrow Wilson might have touched a sensitive point in the psyche of this president, a member for seven years of the Wilson administration whod lived through the eclipse of Wilsonian ideas and of the stricken leader himself.