All language subtitles for Roosevelts 7

Previously on "The Roosevelts, "

FDR began an unprecedented third term.

Why is it do certain moments

produce exactly the right human beings?

Eleanor campaigned for civil rights.

There was that confidence

that Mrs. Roosevelt would get it done.

And America went to war.

I ask that the Congress
declare a state of war.

And now the final chapter

of "The Roosevelts:
An Intimate History."

In April of 1944

in the midst of the Second World War,

the greatest cataclysm in history,

the president of the United States

seemed to have vanished.

Wartime security had obscured
Franklin Roosevelt's movements

ever since the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor,

but this was different.

He was said to be vacationing
"somewhere in the south, "

getting over a bout of bronchitis.

Actually, he was resting

on the sprawling south Carolina estate

of the financier Bernard Baruch.

Coast guard men and marines
guarded the perimeter.

He had been secretly diagnosed
with congestive heart failure.

His doctors feared for his life.

Reporters from the 3 wire services

were housed 8 miles away, told nothing

about the president's actual condition,

rarely able even to lay eyes on FDR.

His uncharacteristic
silence was interrupted

by embarrassing headlines
about him and his family.

His son Elliott's second wife
won a divorce on the grounds

of "unkind, harsh,
and tyrannical" treatment.

His sons marine lieutenant
colonel James Roosevelt

and Navy lieutenant commander
Franklin Roosevelt Jr.

Both received promotions.

Republican newspapers
charged favoritism.

Despite the courage all
of the Roosevelt boys

had shown in combat, gop*** congressmen

routinely attacked their war records,

claiming they were somehow
being protected against harm.

Elliott Roosevelt,
who flew 300 combat missions

and won the distinguished flying cross,

had written to his father that,

"I sometimes really hope
that one of us gets killed

so that they'll stop picking
on the rest of the family."

Democratic senator Harry S.
Truman of Missouri

insisted the White House
respond formally to a letter

from a constituent claiming
that Mrs. Roosevelt

was using 4 cars and
burning up 2,000 gallons

of precious rationed gasoline a month

gallivanting around the country.

Montana senator Burton K. Wheeler,

an isolationist Democrat

who had long since broken
with the president,

predicted FDR's health would
prevent him from running again,

adding, "I wouldn't vote for my
own brother for a fourth term."

Franklin Roosevelt

so transformed the United States

that it was, in essence,
a different land,

a different Republic from
when he took office.

There was an acceptance
in the White House

that government has a responsibility

not just to a few,
but to all of the nation

that no subsequent president,

no matter how Conservative his views,

has ever been able to get away from.

Prior to Franklin Roosevelt,

the assumption was that
the federal government

existed to produce the conditions

for the pursuit of happiness.

Franklin Roosevelt said,
"why stop there?"

The federal government can,
in no small measure,

deliver happiness understood
as material well-being.

No one was president longer.

No one defined the office in
quite such personal terms.

You know, it used to be said

that Franklin Roosevelt's
philosophy of the presidency

was himself in it,

and I think a lot of Americans
came to agree with that.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt

had already occupied the White House

for more than 11 years.

Millions of Americans could
remember no other first family

and had a hard time imagining another,

especially so long as the country

and the world were still at war.

FDR wanted to see the
struggle through to victory

and then to do what Woodrow Wilson

had been unable to do after
the first world war...

bring the United States into a
new international organization

strong enough to ensure

that the world would
not go to war again.

Then, he told his devoted
cousin Daisy Suckley,

he thought he might break yet
another presidential precedent

and retire from office before
his fourth term ended.

Meanwhile, he would maintain
the strictest secrecy

about his own condition,
even from his wife.

I wouldn't discuss

the president's health with
him because I hated the idea

and he knew I hated it.

Either he felt he ought
to serve a fourth term

and wanted it or he didn't.

That was up to the man himself
to decide, and no one else.

May 10, 1944. The White House.

Everyone wanted to greet the president

and see how he looked and felt.

Anna and I held long talks
about his "routine, "

and how difficult it is going
to be to keep him to it.

Anna had the brilliant
thought of suggesting

a nice, cool lunch on the porch,

the lawn looking "green as green."

The president looked across
at the Jefferson Memorial

and decided to give instructions for
trimming the trees back for the vista.

Daisy Suckley.

Daisy Suckley and the
president's daughter Anna,

now living in the White House

with her second husband away at war,

were relieved to see that
a month in South Carolina

had cleared up the president's
supposed "bronchitis."

He did his best to follow
his doctor's regimen

and was pleased to be losing weight

because it would allow him more
easily to stand in his braces,

but he remained listless
and easily tired.

Despite his frailty and
the relentless demands

of the continuing struggle overseas,

Roosevelt had ambitious
postwar plans for his country.

In his latest State
of the Union message,

he had called for a new
"economic bill of rights"

that would guarantee to every
American a living wage,

a decent home, a good education,
and adequate medical care.

"Unless there is security
here at home, " he said,

"there cannot be a lasting
peace in the world."

In truth, Roosevelt late in the war.

At a time when one would suppose

that he was only concerned
with war strategy,

called for an economic bill
of rights more broad-reaching

than anything that the new
deal had contemplated before,

and one of the pieces of
legislation that's put through

near the end of his presidency
is the G.I. Bill of Rights

that will sustain veterans
for many years to come.

The G.I. Bill of Rights,

signed by the president after
it was passed by Congress

without a single dissenting vote,

would provide almost 8
million returning veterans

with vocational or college educations,

help more than two million
more to buy new homes,

and offer other kinds of loans

to launch hundreds of
thousands of new businesses.

No other single piece of
legislation would do more

to expand the American middle class.

Eleanor applauded her husband's
renewed call for reform

and was determined to make
sure he did not abandon it,

but she thought he was exaggerating

his medical condition for attention

and complained that by dining
alone with Anna and Daisy,

he was cut off from the dissenters

she had always invited to
speak their minds to him

over the dinner table.

FDR craved company, but not that kind.

He asked Anna if she would
quietly arrange to have

his old love Lucy Rutherfurd
come to dinner again.

He began seeing her again

because, I suppose, she was a reminder

of a simpler life when
he was able-bodied,

but I think she was a
genuinely nice person

who adored him and believed him

and had no causes of her own,

and, like Daisy Suckley,
she was there to admire him.

His secretaries knew about it.

Daisy Suckley knew about it,
and his daughter,

his daughter Anna, knew about it,

but his wife didn't know about it,

and the other children
didn't know about it,

and it just shows you the worlds
within worlds of the Roosevelts.

I'm convinced that it's simply

a friendship at this point
in time, but think about it.

Lucy must remind him of what it was like

when he was young and healthy,
when he could walk and run,

and here, he's deteriorating
physically day after day,

and it gives him a lift to
remember those old times.

So he decides that he wants to see her.

It will help him to see her,
but the only way he can do that,

fearing that Eleanor
wouldn't understand,

is to have her come to the White House

when Eleanor is away,
and the only person he can trust

to make those scheduling
decisions is Anna.

So you can imagine the
dilemma that it put Anna in,

being asked by her father if she will
make it possible for Lucy to come,

which she does 6 different
times during that year,

but knowing how much it
would hurt her mother,

but she makes the
decision that her father

needs this friendship,
this companionship,

in order to keep going,
as hard as it would be

for her to be the one
that makes that happen.

FDR Jr. Told me that one time,

he came back to the white house
and walked in unannounced,

and his father was sitting
in a chair upstairs

and a strange woman was
massaging his legs,

and he had never seen her before
and had no idea who she was,

and Roosevelt simply said,
"this is an old friend, "

and they shook hands, and Franklin Jr.

Went off to have dinner or whatever,

and years later, he figured out
that that was Mrs. Rutherfurd.

Hyde Park. May 19, 1944.

About 11:30 A.M., the president came,

and suggested we go to top
cottage to see the dogwood.

We put a couple of chairs in
the sun north of the porch

and just talked quietly
about the view, the dogwood,

a little about the coming
invasion of Europe.

Next week is the time,

the exact date depending on
wind and weather and tide.

How that event hangs over us,

has been hanging over us for months,

and here it is, almost at hand.

The world had waited nearly 30 months

for the allies to launch their invasion

of Nazi-occupied Western Europe.

It began with 5 coordinated landings

along the coast of Normandy
on June 6, 1944...

D-Day.

His son James called Franklin Roosevelt

a frustrated clergyman.

It's an interesting insight
because when you think

about what clergymen do,
what do priests do?

All ears are attuned to their voices.

All eyes are on them, and they're acting

in the service of a larger cause.

It's precisely what
FDR saw himself doing.

The great climax of this was the
D-Day prayer in June of 1944

when, for 100 million Americans

listening on the radio, he read aloud

a prayer of his own
composition that he'd written

using the episcopal
book of common prayer.

If 100 million Americans listened in,

that was one of the largest moments

of mass prayer in human history.

Almighty God,

our sons, pride of our nation,

this day have set upon
a mighty endeavor,

a struggle to preserve our Republic,

our religion, and our civilization

and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true.

Give strength to their arms,
stoutness to their hearts,

steadfastness in their faith.

They will need thy blessings.

Their road will be long and hard,

for the enemy is strong.

He may hurl back our forces.

Success may not come with rushing speed,

but we shall return again and again,

and we know that by thy grace

and by the righteousness of our cause

our sons will triumph.

The American commander
who had been assigned

to take Utah Beach on D-Day

was the oldest man in
the invasion force...

57-year-old General
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. ,

the oldest son of the 26th
president of the United States

and the fifth cousin of the 32nd.

Drifting smoke that had
obscured the target

and strong currents that drove
their landing craft off-course

had brought his men in
to shore on Utah Beach

more than 2,000 yards
from the spot chosen

by the D-Day planners.

Roosevelt limped badly from arthritis

and his World War I wounds,

but he refused to seek cover.

He had explained to his wife that,

"it steadies the young men
to know that I am with them,

plodding along with my cane."

He rallied his men

and took the beachhead
in less than an hour,

then accompanied them as they
fought their way inland,

despite sporadic chest pains
that he kept to himself.

A little over a month later,

he died of a massive heart attack.

"Ted's death did something to me
from which I shall not recover, "

Edith Roosevelt told her daughter Ethel.

She had now outlived her husband

and 3 out of 4 of her boys.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
Was posthumously awarded

the medal of honor for gallantry
and courage at Utah Beach.

It was the same medal his father
had once sought for himself

after the battle of San Juan Hill.

Two days after D-Day, Admiral McIntire,

the president's official physician,

issued one of his cheery
periodic bulletins.

The president's health,
he assured the press,

was "excellent in all respects."

As the Democratic convention approached,

fewer and fewer Democratic
insiders believed him,

but it was no time to change leadership.

The allies had not yet
begun to fight their way

through the hedgerows that boxed them in

behind the Normandy beaches.

In the Pacific, American
forces were months away

from beginning the campaign
to retake the Philippines.

No one was willing publicly to admit

that Roosevelt was too ill
to survive a fourth term,

but now the choice of a
vice presidential candidate

assumed an importance it
had never had before.

Conservatives insisted on replacing
the Liberal Henry Wallace.

Even some of Wallace's
most passionate supporters

found him dreamy, impractical, aloof.

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote
a column praising him.

The president told her not to publish it

until the convention was over.

He took no public position on
who should be his running mate

but this time made no
objection to the choice

of the party's more moderate leaders...

senator Harry S. Truman.

Roosevelt was so little interested

that he met privately
with Truman just once

so that photographers could take
a picture of them together.

Truman noticed that the president's hand

trembled so badly, he couldn't
pour cream into his coffee.

Roosevelt never bothered to tell Truman

about the Manhattan Project,
the top-secret program

that would one day
yield the atomic bomb.

Roosevelt accepted his
party's nomination

from his railroad car on
a siding in San Diego.

An associated press
photographer caught him

looking especially
gaunt and slack-jawed.

The picture startled newspaper
readers across the country.

The president's press secretary

kicked the photographer off the train,

but a reporter for the "Chicago Tribune"

noticed something else in
the uncropped picture...

a uniformed stranger who turned
out to be FDR's cardiologist

Lieutenant Commander Howard Bruenn,

assigned to be at Roosevelt's
side wherever he went.

Everyone noticed that he'd
lost a great deal of weight,

and part of it was his illness,

but part of it was a desire
to get back on his feet.

The thinner you are, the easier it is

to stand in braces, and during the war,

he had not made a lot of speeches.

He had not had to stand.

He was exhausted and weary,

and he went to Warm Springs at one point

and was almost pathetically
pleased to see

that he could stand in the pool again

and that somehow if he
kept the weight off,

he would be able to campaign
the way he once had.

On Sunday evening, July 30, 1944,

in Somerville, Massachusetts,

the president's devoted,
long-time personal secretary

Missy Lehand was taken to the movies.

She had suffered two serious
strokes 3 years earlier

but seemed to be improving.

Then she saw the newsreel of FDR
accepting his party's nomination

aboard his railroad car in San Diego.

She hadn't seen him for nearly a year.

He looked like a different man,
haggard and sick.

What is the job before us in 1944?

First, to win the war...

to win it fast,

to win it overwhelmingly.

Secondly, to form worldwide
international organizations

and to arrange to use the armed forces

of the sovereign nations of the world

to make another world war impossible

within the foreseeable future.

Back home from the theater,

Missy leafed through
pictures of them both

when they were young.

That night, she suffered a third stroke

and died the following day.

August 26, 1944.

The war has moved so fast
in the last few days,

one can hardly take it in.

Paris has always been a symbol,

and now that it is again a
city where Frenchmen are free,

I feel that the whole American nation

must breathe a sigh of relief and hope.

The landing craft,

a wholly new type of ship,

one we didn't dream of
two years and a half ago,

came to the beach.

This landing came to the beach

from the transports that
were lying off shore...

August 12, 1944.

At 8 P.M., the president spoke
on the radio from his cruiser

in the Bremerton Navy yards at Seattle.

The social and economic
feature... future.

His voice sounded strong,

but, being on the lookout
for anything "wrong, "

it seemed to me as though he was tired

and that he once or twice
got mixed up on his words.

This would mean nothing
with anyone else,

but we expect perfection
from the president,

and any tiny slip of any
kind always worries me.

Roosevelt had not stood to speak

since losing so much weight.

His braces no longer fit.

The wind ruffled his speech.

The deck heaved,

and he suffered intense pain
in his chest and shoulders...

a sudden, severe attack of angina.

"It scared the hell out of us,
" Dr. Bruenn remembered,

but Roosevelt soldiered on.

At Quebec citadel,

there was an air of satisfaction.

The 6-day conference was over.

At the eighth allied
conference since 1941,

Roosevelt and Churchill agreed

that once Germany had surrendered,

she should be divided among the victors,

including the Soviet Union.

After a final formal dinner on
the evening of September 15,

Roosevelt, Churchill,
the Canadian Prime Minister,

and their aides watched a
new movie from Hollywood...

"Wilson, " a romanticized
life of the president

under whom FDR had served
during the Great War.

Toward the end, the exhausted president

refuses to give up his struggle
for the league of nations

and a world in which such
wars can never happen again.

But you'll kill yourself.

I must go on.

Mr. Tomkin,

will you please tell the newspaper men

that we're returning to
Washington immediately?

As FDR watched the film,

he was heard muttering to himself,

"by God, that's not
going to happen to me."

His whole left side is paralyzed.

Afterwards,

Bruenn took the president's
blood pressure.

It was 240 over 130, dangerously high,

the highest his doctors
had yet recorded.

♪ We'll remember in November
how you voted in the spring ♪

♪ we're keeping score for '44,
and we won't miss a thing ♪

Governor Thomas Dewey of New York,

Roosevelt's Republican opponent in 1944,

struck many, even among his supporters,

as stiff and pompous.

Alice Longworth,

Theodore Roosevelt's oldest daughter,

once compared Dewey

to "the little man on
the wedding cake, "

but he was young and vigorous,

in vivid contrast, he said,

to the "old, tired, and quarrelsome men"

of the Roosevelt administration.

Questions about Roosevelt and his health

were being raised everywhere.

"Let's not be squeamish, "

said an editorial in the "New York Sun."

"6 presidents have died in office."

"I don't know how it will turn out, "

Eleanor Roosevelt told a friend.

"If Franklin loses,
I'll be personally glad

but worried for the world."

If FDR were to win again,

he had to convince the country
he was still up to the job.

Before the International
Teamsters Union,

president Roosevelt opens
his fight for re-election.

In late September,
FDR spoke at a Teamster's dinner

in Washington where everyone
had had a lot to drink.

The speech was broadcast
all over the country,

and the president made the most of it.

A Republican congressman
had charged falsely

on the floor of the
house that the president

had wasted taxpayer dollars
and risked sailors' lives

by sending a destroyer
to pick up his dog.

These Republican leaders
have not been content

with attacks on me

or on my wife or on my sons.

No. Not content with that,

they now include my little dog Fala.

Well, of course, I don't resent attacks,

and my family don't resent attacks,

but Fala does resent them.

You know...

you know, Fala is scotch...

And being a scottie,

as soon as he learned that the
Republican fiction writers

in Congress and out
had concocted a story

that I'd left him behind
on an Aleutian island

and had sent a destroyer
back to find him

at a cost to the taxpayers
of $2 million or $3 million

or $8 million or $20 million dollars,

his scotch soul was furious.

He has not been the same dog since.

The president made

his first campaign speech
on Saturday night.

It was extremely clever,
and he never spoke

with more "pep" and humor.

A few speeches like that,
and we won't worry

about the results of the
election on November 7.

As he launched his formal campaign
in New York on October 21,

a cold, steady rain lashed the city.

His doctors protested,

but the president insisted
on riding in an open car

for 51 miles through
4 of the 5 boroughs.

Somewhere between 1.5
million and 3 million people

turned out to see if he was all right,

and he had to demonstrate
to them that he was.

Now the procession

through the Metropolis
in a downpour of rain

which Mr. Roosevelt
braves in an open car,

FDR's first outdoor appearance
as a campaigning candidate.

He doesn't seem to mind
the weather one bit.

New York certainly knows there's
a political campaign on.

At one point, his car was stopped

so that he could be carried inside

to have his soaking wet clothes changed

by aides and secret service men

and to down a stiff bourbon.

Watch the car. Watch yourself.

Crowds at Ebbets Baseball
Field, Brooklyn,

greet president Roosevelt,

starting his tour of New York City.

Here on behalf of his
friend Senator Bob Wagner,

Mr. Roosevelt has a special
word for Brooklyn Dodger fans.

We want Roosevelt!

We want Roosevelt!

We want Roosevelt!

We want Roosevelt!

We want Roosevelt!

We want Roosevelt!

Hey!

You know I come from
the state of New York,

and I've got to make a
terrible confession to you.

I come from the state of New York,

and I practiced law in New York City,

but I have never been
in Ebbets Field before.

I've rooted for the Dodgers...

And I hope to come back here
some day and see them play.

Thanks ever so much.

The tour of the city
took more than 4 hours,

and then Roosevelt went on
that evening to deliver

a major address to the
foreign policy association.

As election day grew near,
good news was coming in

from battlefields all around the world.

The Navy destroyed most of what remained

of the Japanese fleet at Leyte Gulf.

General Douglas MacArthur waded
ashore in the Philippines.

The first American troops
had crossed the Rhine

and ventured onto German soil.

Roosevelt took no chances.

He campaigned through 7 states

and spoke at Wilmington
and Philadelphia;

Fort Wayne and Chicago;

Clarksburg, West Virginia;

Bridgeport; Hartford; Springfield;

Kingston and Poughkeepsie
before returning to Hyde Park

to vote and wait for the returns.

It was the closest of the 4
presidential races he'd run.

FDR for the fourth time.

It has become trite to
say he is an amazing man

with an amazing career,

and what more does the
future hold for him?

The "tired old man" put one
over on Dewey this time!

The night was like the
other election nights

with the president

and a handful of helpers
bringing the tickers.

Only one real interruption when
the Hyde Park torch parade

had to be spoken to from the terrace.

It was chilly out there,

but FDR, with cape open,
seemed unconscious of it.

The rest of us hugged
our coats about us.

On December 16

under a thick cloud of winter mist,

3 Nazi panzer divisions began
a massive surprise attack

on the allied lines in Belgium

in what became known as
the battle of the bulge.

For a week, it seemed possible

they might split U.S.
Forces from their British comrades,

a final gamble by Hitler
and his generals.

As always, Roosevelt remained
calm when receiving bad news.

He followed the fighting
in his map room,

but he did not try to
second-guess his commanders.

"In great stress, "

General George Marshall remembered,

"Roosevelt was a strong man."

Then on December 23,
the weather cleared.

American planes began
bombarding the enemy,

and things began to turn.

It was the costliest
battle in Western Europe.

There were 90,000 American casualties.

Two days later, the president gathered

all his family around him
at Hyde Park for Christmas.

His sons and his son-in-law
were home on leave.

I am thankful for every glimpse,

no matter how short,
of any of our own boys

when they get a short time
out of the fighting areas.

I try to remember always

what an old friend of my
grandmother's used to say...

"enjoy every minute you
have with those you love,

for no one can take joy
that is past away from you.

It'll be there in your heart

to live on when the dark days come."

For Roosevelt's fourth
inaugural on January 20, 1945,

there was no traditional
ceremony at the Capitol,

no procession.

With the world at war,
"who is there to parade?"

The president had asked.

The signal came,

and the president moved out to the porch

behind the chief justice and
the two vice presidents,

old and new.

Two men lifted him out of his chair

to an upright position.

He held on to the handles on
the desk with both hands.

During the first part of the speech,

it looked as though his right arm

was straining a good deal.

It was trembling.

You will understand and,
I believe, agree

with my wish that the
form of this inauguration

be simple and its words brief.

FDR had not attempted to
stand in public for 3 months.

His inaugural address was the
shortest since George Washington,

less than 5 minutes,

but his message was pure Roosevelt.

We shall strive for perfection.

We shall not achieve it immediately,

but we still shall strive.

We may make mistakes,

but they must never be
mistakes which result

from faintness of heart or
abandonment of moral principle.

I remember that my old
schoolmaster Dr. Peabody said...

in days that seemed to us then
to be secure and untroubled,

he said, "things in life will
not always run smoothly.

Sometimes we will be
rising toward the heights.

Then all will seem to reverse
itself and start downward.

The great fact to remember
is that the trend

of civilization itself
is forever upward,

that a line drawn through the middle

of the peaks and the
valleys of the centuries

always has an upward trend."

"It did us all good to
see him standing there, "

Daisy wrote, "straight and vigorous,

thin but with good color.

All the sentimental ladies
who love him, " she added,

"were ready for tears!"

As they say, that and that.

Yes, sir.

That's it.

Hoping to solve intricate
problems of war and peace,

President Roosevelt
reaches the Yalta meeting

accompanied by his daughter
Mrs. Anna Boettiger.

These are army signal corps pictures

of an historic world meeting

that will shape the destiny
of future generations.

In early February 1945

as American forces
gathered for the assault

on Iwo Jima in the Pacific,

the next rung on the
ladder that led to Japan,

Roosevelt undertook yet another
arduous overseas journey

to the Soviet Union

and the dilapidated czarist palace

near Yalta on the Black Sea

to meet once more with
Churchill and Stalin.

Roosevelt's mind was
still perfectly clear,

but he was obviously very ill,

startling the Russians and the British.

Eleanor had hoped to attend,

but FDR had taken Anna with him instead.

She tried her best to keep
him from too much exertion.

"I found out through Dr.
Bruenn that this ticker situation

is more serious than I ever knew, "

Anna wrote to her husband,

"and the biggest
difficulty is that we can,

of course, tell no one.

It's truly worrisome,

and there's not a hell of a
lot anyone can do about it."

Churchill was tired, too,

and the stakes could
not have been higher.

Churchill saw, in his tragic
world view, that the Soviets

were going to be more of
a threat than Roosevelt

at least wanted to think at that moment.

There's a myth of Yalta
that Roosevelt got it wrong

and Churchill got it right,

but it's much more
complicated than that.

Roosevelt was always

a practical politician.

Roosevelt never believed
in making the first move.

He didn't make the
first move with Hitler.

He didn't make the
first move with Stalin.

He let his opponents commit
themselves and then he struck,

and I think that that would
have been his reaction

to what became the cold war.

The Soviet premier was triumphant.

His armies had overrun
Romania, Bulgaria,

Hungary, Poland, and East Prussia

and were closing in on Berlin itself,

and he saw no reason to
let go of the eastern

and central European nations
his armies had taken

from the Germans at such a fearful cost.

The Americans and British
had neither the resolve

nor the capability to change his mind.

Stalin agreed to join a
postwar united nations

provided the USSR had a veto as
a member of the Security Council

and was awarded two extra
votes in the general assembly

for the so-called
independent "republics"

of Ukraine and White Russia,

and he pledged,
to Roosevelt's great relief,

to enter the ongoing
struggle against Japan.

At the time, this seemed necessary.

Roosevelt didn't know... nobody knew...

that the atomic bomb would work.

Roosevelt also understood that
Soviet domination of Poland

was, at this point, a fait accompli,

that the only way to get
the Soviets out of Poland

was to march into Poland
with American soldiers.

He knew perfectly well
that there was no support

in the United States for that.

It's a sign of the enormous tension

and the conflicting
forces that were at play

in the highest levels of the alliance.

Roosevelt always believed
that he could end up

in the end managing those to the good.

He just ran out of time in 1945.

Maybe he could have,

but Warm Springs intervened.

Roosevelt was weak and weary

when he returned from Yalta,
so weak and weary

that, for the first time
in his political life,

he made reference to the braces

without which he could not stand.

I hope that you will pardon
me for an unusual posture

of sitting down during the presentation

of what I want to say,
but I know that you will realize

that it makes it a lot
easier for me in not having

to carry about 10 pounds of steel around

on the bottom of my legs and
also because of the fact

that I have just completed
a 14,000-mile trip.

I come from the Crimea Conference

with a firm belief that
we have made a good start

on the road to a world of peace.

Never before have the major
allies been more closely united,

and they're determined to
continue to be united,

to be united with each other and
with all peace-loving nations

so that the ideal of lasting
peace will become a reality.

We haven't won the wars yet.

It's a long, tough road to Tokyo.

Roosevelt still had big plans.

He told Eleanor he wanted
her to accompany him soon

to Britain, Holland, France,

and he hoped someday to
travel to the Middle East

and show the people there how
to make their desert bloom,

but first, he told Daisy in private,

he wanted to return to Warm Springs

and "sleep and sleep and sleep."

Warm Springs. March 30.

A crowd was waiting at
the station, as always.

We drove slowly past the
front of Georgia Hall,

where a large group of patients
were collected to clap and wave

and from there on up to
the little White House.

Dear Franklin,
he is completely "let down, "

which means that he is
relaxed and able to rest.

Later, the stationmaster

at Warm Springs would
remember that the president

had been "the worst-looking man
I ever saw who was still alive."

"The boss is slipping away from us, "

one of the president's secretaries

told Dr. Bruenn that evening,

"and no earthly power can save him."

Bruenn agreed his
patient was "precarious"

but still hoped rest might restore him

as it had so many times before.

For 10 days, with Daisy Suckley

and his cousin Laura
Delano caring for him,

he did his best to rest,

but the president of the Philippines

stopped in for lunch.

There were cables back and
forth between him and Churchill

over how to deal with the Soviets,

and when the first lady
called one evening

urging him to intervene
personally to get arms

to a particular band
of Yugoslav partisans,

she would not take no for an answer.

When the president finally put
the phone down after 45 minutes,

his blood pressure had risen 50 points.

On April 9, Lucy Rutherfurd
joined FDR at Warm Springs,

bringing with her a painter
named Elizabeth Shoumatoff

whom she had asked to paint
the president's portrait.

April 10.

The lunch party was awfully nice.

Everybody was cheerful and responsive,

and Franklin told stories to his
heart's content until 4 P.M.

He went off to rest, came out at 5:00

looking more tired than ever,
and went out for a drive.

He took Lucy and Fala with
him to Dowdell's knob.

They sat in the setting
sun for over an hour,

the best thing he could do.

On April 12, 1945,

Eleanor Roosevelt held her
usual press conference

at the White House.

She laid out her crowded
schedule for the next few days,

beginning with the
annual thrift-shop tea

that afternoon at the Sulgrave club,

dinner with the American
friends committee,

a tea for New York Democrats,

a visit to a handicapped
children's clinic,

and then she would join her husband

for the San Francisco conference

that was to form the united nations.

Nothing had so deeply interested her

since the early days of
the new deal, she said.

In Georgia, working over
the final draft of a speech

in the warm southern sun,
FDR had been thinking

about his hopes for the
postwar world, as well.

I remember saying

once upon a time in the long,
long ago when I was a freshman,

that the only thing our people
had to fear was fear itself.

We were in fear then
of economic collapse.

We struck back boldly against
that fear, and we overcame it.

The work now, my friends, is peace...

more than an end to this war,

an end to the beginnings of all wars,

and to all Americans who
dedicate themselves with us

to the making of an
abiding peace, I say,

the only limit to our
realization of tomorrow

will be our doubts of today.

Let us move forward with
strong and active faith.

Late that morning, when the president

was wheeled into the living
room of his cottage,

Daisy thought he looked
better than he had in days.

So did Lucy Rutherfurd and Laura Delano

and Madame Shoumatoff,

who continued to work on his portrait.

He stopped reading his
mail to eat a little

of the sweetened oatmeal
his doctors thought

might help improve his appetite,

then returned to reading his mail.

It was about 1:45.

Lunch was to be served in 15 minutes.

Daisy looked up from her crocheting.

Franklin seemed

to be looking for something,

his head forward, his hands fumbling.

I went forward and looked into his face.

"Have you dropped your cigarette?"

He looked at me with his
forehead furrowed in pain

and tried to smile.

He put his left hand up to the
back of his head and said,

"I have a terrific pain
in the back of my head."

Roosevelt lost consciousness.

He had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.

The president was carried
into his bedroom.

Daisy called for the doctor.

There was nothing anyone could do.

Lucy Rutherfurd drove away
with Madame Shoumatoff

as quickly as she could.

3:35 P.M.

Franklin D. Roosevelt,

the hope of the world,

is dead.

What this means to all
who knew him personally

is impossible to put into words.

What it means to the world,
only the future can tell.

He was just 63 years old.

Eleanor was listening to a pianist play

at the thrift-shop tea
at the Sulgrave Club.

Before she left the White House,

Laura Delano had called from Georgia

to tell her the president
had "fainted, "

but admiral McIntire had urged
her to go on with her schedule

as if nothing had happened
for fear of alarming anyone.

She happened to be sitting at the tea

next to the widow of Woodrow Wilson.

Then the mistress of ceremonies

whispered that she had a telephone call.

The president's press
secretary Steve Early

asked her to come home immediately.

"I did not even ask why,
" she remembered.

"I knew down in my heart

that something dreadful had happened."

Early and Admiral McIntire told her

that the president had slipped away.

Vice President Truman arrived at 5:00,

not sure why he'd been summoned.

"Harry, " Eleanor told him,

"the president is dead."

After a moment, he asked

if there was anything
he could do for her.

"No, " she said.

"Is there anything we can do for you?

For you're the one in trouble now."

We interrupt this program to bring you

a special news bulletin
from CBS World News.

A press association has just announced

that President Roosevelt is dead.

The president died of
a cerebral hemorrhage.

All we know so far is
that the president died

at Warm Springs in Georgia.

On April 12, 1945,

I had a date with a young
woman in Greenwich Village,

and I walked into her apartment,
and the radio was blaring,

and I listened to it, and she said to me

when I was listening on the radio,

"Franklin Roosevelt has died, "

and I was dumbstruck, and then I said,

"oh, my God, Harry Truman is
president of the United States, "

and it seemed inconceivable that anybody

but Franklin Roosevelt
could be president...

And I wandered around the city
hardly knowing what I was doing

or felt, and I thought,
"my father has died, "

and the notion that Franklin Roosevelt

was father to the American people,

even would call himself papa,

it really was true,

and there was this
extraordinary sense of loss,

of not knowing how we
were gonna go on...

and that feeling was
widespread in the country,

an enormous sense of mourning,

of feeling that they had been
in the presence of greatness

and it was now taken away from them,

that they were on their own.

Eleanor wrote out a cable

to be sent to her 4 sons overseas...

"he did his job as he would
want you to do, " it said.

Then she left for Warm Springs.

She arrived shortly before midnight.

She asked exactly what had happened.

Franklin's cousin Laura
Delano told Eleanor

that Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd

had been with her husband
when he collapsed

and furthermore that she and Franklin

had seen one another several
times over the last few years

and that her daughter Anna

had sometimes helped
arrange those visits.

Eleanor said nothing.

I can't even imagine what
it must have been like

for Eleanor to absorb that
her husband had just died

and to absorb what must have
felt like a terrible betrayal.

She said when she went on the train

with her husband's body
back to Washington,

she felt like she wasn't even herself.

She looked out at the people outside,

but some part of her was just not there.

She accompanied her husband's body home

from Warm Springs,
where the hearse passed slowly

by his fellow polios so that
they could say good-bye.

Thousands wept along the tracks

as his funeral train made
its way to Washington...

He'd been the president for 12 years,

and the word "president"
meant Roosevelt,

and suddenly to have him
gone with the war not over

had an enormous impact on people.

No one alive then can't
tell you where they were

and how they felt and what people said.

When the funeral procession is passing,

there's a story told about a man
who falls to his knees in grief.

Another man standing next to
him helps him to his feet

and says, "did you know the president?"

And the first man says,
"no, but he knew me."

And then on to Hyde Park,

where he was to be buried in
his mother's rose garden.

Eleanor felt sorrow

for the grieving Americans
she saw along the way,

she remembered, but her own feelings

remained "almost impersonal,
" perhaps because

"much further back, I had had
to face certain difficulties

until I decided to accept the fact

that a man must be what he is,
life must be lived as it is,

and you cannot live at
all if you do not learn

to adapt yourself to your
life as it happens to be."

Poor E.R.

I believe she loved him more
deeply than she knows herself,

and his feeling for her
was deep and lasting.

The fact that they could not
relax together or play together

is the tragedy of their joint lives,

for I believe,

from everything that
I have seen of them,

that they had everything else in common.

It was a matter of personalities.

I cannot blame either of them.

Daisy Suckley.

All human beings have failings.

All human beings have needs
and temptations and stresses.

Men and women who live
together through long years

get to know one another's failings,

but they also come to know
what is worthy of respect

and admiration in those they
live with and in themselves.

If at the end, one can say,
"this man used to the limit

the powers that God granted him.

He was worthy of love and respect

and of the sacrifice many people made

in order that he might achieve
what he deemed to be his task, "

then that life has been lived well

and there are no regrets.

It was late.

Churchill said,
"I felt as if I was struck

with the force of a physical blow, "

when the word comes,

and he ultimately gave
a very powerful eulogy

in the house of commons, saying that,

"Franklin Roosevelt was the
greatest friend of freedom

Britain or the world has ever known."

Stalin was "distressed" at the news

and worried that someone
had poisoned the president.

Huddled in his bunker in
Berlin, Hitler exulted.

"See? The war is not lost,
" he told an aide.

He would be dead in 18 days.

The war in Europe ended
a week after that.

Hitler's 1,000-year Reich
had lasted just 12 years.

Theodore Roosevelt's
widow Edith was shocked

at the news of FDR's death

and wired "love and
sympathy" to Eleanor.

The war years had mellowed her view

of her late husband's cousin.

He was "a nice man, " she said,
and had turned out to be

as Conservative as Alexander Hamilton

and as Democratic as
Theodore Roosevelt's hero

Abraham Lincoln.

Without question, if tr
died at the end of his life

feeling a sense of frustration
and unrealized ambition

and knowing that the ideas that
he had hoped to put into place,

the progressive era,
had not gone into place under him,

FDR could die at the
end of his life knowing

that almost everything he
had wanted to accomplish

he had accomplished,

and he would loom as
the far larger figure,

even though he stood in TR's
shadow when he was a young man.

Roosevelt said in his last inaugural

that "our constitution
is not perfect yet.

Nothing is perfect yet,
but we have to press on, "

and what Roosevelt made possible

was a kind of Democratic vigor

to go forth from new deal America,

World War II America, around the world,

and we weren't always right.

We committed enormous sins.

He was wrong about Japanese internment.

He was too slow on civil rights,

but he kept a process going

that Washington kept going
and Jefferson kept going

and Jackson and Lincoln and tr and FDR.

They kept alive the
possibility of progress,

and they did it despite
their shortcomings.

They overcame their flaws,

and I think that's really
what great leadership is.

It's transcending the
natural limitations

with which we're all born

and managing to change
the history of the world

just a little bit for the good,

and in Franklin Roosevelt's case,

he changed it quite a bit for the good.

Every Democratic president since 1945

has lived in the shadow
of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Harry Truman was constantly
being measured by FDR.

His success in that
remarkable election in 1948

was largely due to his ability
to keep the FDR coalition going.

John F. Kennedy used the CCC

as the basis for the Peace Corps.

Lyndon Johnson said,
"FDR was a daddy to me always, "

and much of the war on
poverty in the great society

derives from the new deal.

Jimmy Carter, instead of
opening his campaign in Detroit

as Democratic candidates usually did,

chose instead Warm Springs, Georgia.

Bill Clinton said that
his grandfather thought

that when he died,
he was gonna go to Roosevelt

rather than to heaven,

and Barack Obama,
even before he took office,

again and again alluded
to the experience

of Roosevelt and the new deal.

The White House. April 19, 1945.

Hick dearest,

the Trumans have just been to lunch,

and nearly all that I can do is done.

The upstairs looks desolate,

and I'll be glad to leave tomorrow.

It is empty and without
purpose to be here now.

Franklin's death ended
a period in history,

and now in its wake for lots
of us who lived in his shadow,

we have to start again
under our own momentum

and wonder what we can achieve.

Much love, dear.

E.R.

A few days later,
Eleanor Roosevelt emerged

from her New York apartment
on Washington Square

to find a newspaperwoman
waiting on the sidewalk.

"The story is over,
" she said gently and hurried on,

but it was not over.

Eleanor Roosevelt is a sort of miracle

of the human spirit, I think.

There are so many times in her life

when you would think she
would have given up...

when she was a little girl,

when she was betrayed
during World War I,

then this awful betrayal at the end...

and somehow, she
continued doing her work.

She lived to meet the needs of others.

She explained that early on,
and she never abandoned it,

that the way to be loved

was to do things for people,
to help them,

and I think that's what
she always relied on

to go on, and she went on.

The atomic bomb ended
the war in the Pacific.

FDR had given the go-ahead to build it

because he feared the Nazis
would build one first,

and Mrs. Roosevelt had no quarrel

with President Truman's
decision to use it,

but she understood that
when the bomb fell,

a new world had been born,

"a world, " she wrote,
"in which we have to learn

to live in friendship with our neighbors

of every race, creed, or color

or do away with civilization."

Arrangements are now being
made for the formal signing

of the surrender terms at the
earliest possible moment.

Newsmen rush the president's report

to a waiting world,
and through the early evening

Tuesday, August 14,
the fateful news is flashed.

In New York City, as throughout
a rejoicing nation and world,

vast throngs of grateful, happy people

celebrate the end of fighting,
the dawn of peace.

Two million New Yorkers
jam Times Square.

It's official. It's all over.
It's total victory.

The world remembered
Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

commander-in-chief,
American war casualty.

Years of brave responsibility
took their toll.

A grateful world honors him today.

In late 1945,

President Truman asked Eleanor Roosevelt

to be a delegate to the first meeting

of the united nations
general assembly in London.

Before disembarking,
she held a press conference.

"For the first time in my life,
" she told reporters,

"I can say just what I want.

For your information,
it is wonderful to feel free."

Then she asked that those
words be kept off the record.

Her fellow delegates
included two Republicans

who had actively opposed her
husband's foreign policy...

Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg

and the veteran diplomat
John Foster Dulles.

Both thought her a naive do-gooder

appointed purely for political
and sentimental reasons.

She didn't think much of them, either.

Vandenberg was "hard to get
along with" and secretive,

she told an old friend,

and, "J. Foster Dulles
I like not at all."

She astonished them both.

Perhaps a million displaced
persons from Eastern Europe

refused to return to territories
now under Russian rule.

Mrs. Roosevelt's committee agreed

they should be given
the right of asylum.

Andrei Vishinsky, who had been
the merciless Soviet prosecutor

during the purge trials of the 1930s,

demanded their immediate, forced return,

equating giving in to their
demands to appeasing Hitler.

Mrs. Roosevelt was asked to respond.

"The united nations was
created to safeguard

the rights of individual
human beings, " she said,

"not the prerogatives of governments.

Refugees should be allowed
to live where they liked."

It is my ruling

as chairman of the commission
that the point raised

by the Soviet member is out of order.

The Soviet member or anyone
else on the commission

may, of course,
appeal against this ruling.

The Russians lost the vote.

Mrs. Roosevelt won the
admiration of her colleagues.

Senator Vandenberg told the press

her performance had made him want

to "take back everything
I ever said about her,

and, believe me, it's been plenty."

She was unanimously elected
chair of a committee

to draw up a universal
declaration of human rights,

history's first attempt at
laying out the principles

under which all nations should
behave toward their own citizens

as well as toward one another.

It would not be easy.

Her committee included

Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists,

the representatives of
democracies and dictatorships,

colonial powers and
once-colonized peoples,

and she had to deal
with a state department

constantly worried she
would promise too much.

She was as tough as she was tactful

and drove her fellow delegates so hard

that one felt called upon to remind her

that they had human rights, too.

If they wanted shorter days,

Theodore Roosevelt's
favorite niece answered,

they should make shorter speeches.

Thanks largely to what
one admirer called

her distinctive blend of
"naivete" and "cunning, "

they fell into line one by one.

This universal declaration
of human rights

may well become the
international Magna Carta

of all men everywhere.

Man must have freedom in which
to develop his full stature

and through common effort

to raise the level of human dignity.

New Zealand? Yes.

United Kingdom? Yes.

At 3:00 in the morning
on December 10, 1948,

the declaration was adopted

without a single dissenting vote.

Afterwards, the entire general assembly

did something it had never done before

and has never done since.

It rose to give a standing ovation

to a single delegate.

All her life, Eleanor Roosevelt said,

she'd wanted to "take on a job

and see it through to a conclusion."

She had done it, and she had triumphed.

She was characteristically
modest about her achievement.

The declaration was not self-enforcing.

The challenge, she said,
was one of "actually living and working

in our countries in freedom and
justice for each human being."

Mrs. Roosevelt had a very fast walk.

In fact, her walk was just not fast.

It was purposeful,

somewhat like her Uncle Theodore,

and she was stopped by
people who would say

the most poignant things to her...

"you saved my family."

"During world war ii,
you reunited us"...

and she would say,
"thank you very much, "

and want to push on,

and I would think perhaps
she hadn't heard them,

but that wasn't the
reason she didn't stop.

She was no longer interested
in what had been accomplished.

Her interest was in all
the things in the world

that remained to be done.

She seemed to be everywhere,

taking note of everything,

asking what she could do to help.

The colonial era was coming to an end.

The west needed to find
new ways to relate

to the newly liberated
peoples emerging from it.

And Mrs. Roosevelt said about India,

"it's like Mount Everest.

You think you can never get
to the top of these problems,

but like climbing mount Everest,
you take a first step."

She took time out to
fulfill a lifelong dream...

sitting in the moonlight and
gazing at the Taj Mahal,

just as her father had promised her

he would do with her one day.

She was an early and effective
advocate for Israel.

In the Soviet Union, she debated
with premier Nikita khrushchev,

and when she went to see
Lenin's tomb in red square,

she insisted on standing in line

along with hundreds of
ordinary Soviet citizens.

Throughout her public life,

Eleanor Roosevelt had always
had a small circle of friends

in whom she could confide her
private thoughts and feelings...

Nancy cook and Marion Dickerman,

Earl Miller, Lorena
Hickock, Joseph lash.

Now a new friend was
often at her side...

a New York physician,
an expert on polio,

18 years younger than she...
named David Gurewitsch.

When the president died,

David got a call in his office,
and it was Mrs. Roosevelt,

and she said, "I've moved
back to New York now,

"and I shall need a doctor in New York.

Are you willing to be my doctor?"

And he wrote in a note,
he said, "I agreed, "

and then she said,

"I promise not to bother you too much, "

and that was the beginning.

More letters would follow,
hundreds of them.

Dr. Gurewitsch became her
confidant and constant companion

as well as her doctor.

Her friend Esther Lape,
who had known her

since her first forays into reform,

believed he was "dearer to her
than anyone else in the world."

"I love you, " she once told him,

"as I love and have never
loved anyone else."

Mrs. Roosevelt found in him a person

she could trust, and that was
a wonderful thing for her,

and she found in David someone,
basically, who took care of her,

who was loyal to her,

and had a lively interest in her work.

When Dr. Gurewitsch became
engaged to Edna Perkel,

it took both women a
little time to adjust.

All I knew was

that they were very close friends

because the first time I had
dinner was a shock to me.

The 3 of us alone at dinner,

that's when I knew that this
was a very close friendship.

She was uneasy, quite uneasy

about how the 3 of us would be together,

and, indeed, in a letter
she wrote to him,

she said that I was a nice person,

and she said, "I fully expected
our relationship to change, "

but, in fact, it was reinforced,

and she made it her business
that this was going to work

because she wanted to keep David close.

She told me that she loved me.

Mrs. Roosevelt and the Gurewitsches

eventually bought a house
together on East 74th Street,

just 9 blocks from the twin brownstones

Sara Delano Roosevelt had
built for herself, Eleanor,

and Franklin more than
half a century before.

Mrs. Roosevelt never had dinner alone

if she could help it because she was,

as David said, "a
chronically lonely person."

She really never had dinner alone.

Mrs. Roosevelt came upstairs.

She marched into the kitchen and said,
"may I help you, dear?"

And my heart sank because Mrs. Roosevelt

had no clue about what
happens in a kitchen.

So I thought she could do the least harm

if I asked her to wash the lettuce,

and so she stood beside me at the sink,

and she was washing lettuce,
and I said after a few moments,

"would you excuse me, Mrs. Roosevelt?"

I went in to my husband,
and I said to David,

"find an excuse to get
her out of the kitchen

because we're standing in
water up to our ankles, "

and she never helped me
in the kitchen again.

Eleanor Roosevelt

had been her husband's
Liberal conscience,

always urging him to do what
she saw as the right thing.

During her last years,
she served her country

and her party in the same role.

Over the next decade,

she continued her work on
behalf of civil rights,

championing integration
of the armed forces,

applauding the integration
of the schools,

publicizing instances of discrimination,

supporting the freedom riders,

and ignoring the death threats

that never stopped coming her way.

Eleanor Roosevelt.

At a national convention of the NAACP,

she interviewed the first black student

to integrate the
University of Alabama...

Autherine Lucy.

Now, you must have felt all
alone in this situation.

Were you very much afraid?

I have to admit that, yes, I was afraid,

but it is my policy

that in any situation
which calls for courage,

we cannot give in to our fear.

We must overpower our fear,

and that is what I did in this respect.

In 1949,

Mrs. Roosevelt had found
herself in conflict

with Cardinal Francis
Spellman of New York.

She backed a bill on
constitutional grounds

that barred parochial
schools from receiving

direct aid from the federal government.

The cardinal denounced
her as anti-catholic

and went on to accuse her of actions

"unworthy of an American mother."

Her friends were furious.

She remained cool in her response.

"The final judgment, my dear cardinal,

of the worthiness of all human beings

is in the hands of God."

In the end, it was the cardinal

who had to call upon her at
val-kill to make his peace.

And even if there were

only one communist in
the State Department,

even if there were only one communist

in the State Department, that would
still be one communist too many.

Eleanor called McCarthy "our gestapo."

She was just horrified by the silence

of some of her former allies

and by so many people naming names.

She thought it was a really
disgusting moment in political life.

"The day I'm afraid to sit down

with people I do not know, " she said,

"because 5 years from now,
someone will say

5 of those people were communists

and, therefore, I am a communist,

that will be a sad day."

She had sad days of her own,

most often connected with
her troubled children

whose continuing problems
she was unable to solve.

Sometimes, she confided
to David Gurewitsch,

they brought her close to suicide.

Eleanor Roosevelt suffered
from exactly the same kind

of depression that her
uncle Theodore did,

and she, too, in order to stay
sane, had to stay active.

All her life, she could not stop doing.

Even as an old lady,

she would sit up till
3:00 in the morning

answering letters from
perfect strangers.

She needed to be needed.

There was no question about that

because at the end when
she didn't want to live,

the reason she didn't want
to live was fundamentally

that she felt she could
not be useful anymore.

She used to tell me,
people are given obstacles

in life to grow strong on,
and once, I said to her,

"Mrs. Roosevelt, not everybody
grows strong on obstacles.

Some people just fall down, "

and she said very determinedly,

"you're not supposed to fall down.

You must keep standing and walking."

Her work was always her salvation.

When she was asked a political question

she didn't want to answer,

she liked to say,
"I know nothing of politics."

In fact, she could be
as politically shrewd

and as unforgiving as her old friend

and political mentor
Louis Howe had been.

In 1954, her son Franklin

was denied the Democratic nomination

for governor of New York

by the boss of Tammany
Hall Carmine Desapio.

She vowed to get even.

In order to get ahead more
than 40 years earlier,

her husband had made peace with
the Tammany boss of his time.

This time, his widow had other ideas.

She helped establish
a reform organization

to combat boss rule,

campaigned from the roofs of
sound trucks in the summer heat,

and eventually ended
the career of the man

who double-crossed her son.

"I said I'd get him, " she told
a friend on election night,

"and I got him."

In 1956, she helped the worldly,

well-traveled governor of
Illinois Adlai Stevenson

win the Democratic presidential
nomination for the second time.

It is a foolish thing to say
that you pledge yourself

to live up to the traditions

of the new deal and the fair deal.

Of course you are proud
of those traditions.

Of course you are proud
to have the advice

of the elders in our party,

but our party is young and vigorous.

Our party may be the
oldest Democratic Party,

but our party...

our party must live

as a young party,

and it must have young leadership.

It was imperative that the
Democrats return to power,

she said, "but they must come
back with the right leaders."

For her, even though Dwight eisenhower

had already beaten Stevenson
once back in 1952,

he was that leader, and during
the campaign that followed,

she offered him practical advice
on how to reach the voters.

Get to know more ordinary
people, she told him.

Speak as if you're
talking to one person.

Every speech need not be
the Gettysburg Address.

Eisenhower crushed Stevenson again,

but 4 years later, she was still for him

and against the front-runner...

Senator John F.
Kennedy of Massachusetts.

She thought Kennedy too inexperienced,

too willing to cut corners,
too close to his father Joseph,

whose pre-war defeatism
she had not forgotten,

and she said all of this
and more on television.

When Kennedy complained
she was being unfair,

she wired him right back.

"My dear boy, " she wrote.

"I only say these things
for your own good.

I have found in a lifetime of adversity

that when blows are rained on one,

it is advisable to turn
the other profile."

Stevenson proved a tentative candidate,

but Mrs. Roosevelt
went to the convention

in Los Angeles on his behalf, anyway,

hoping somehow to stop
the Kennedy bandwagon.

When the delegates spotted
her entering the hall,

they stood and cheered for 7 minutes.

She pretended not to notice
for as long as she could

because, she said,
it would have been impolite

to the speaker to
acknowledge the applause,

and she later wrote him
a letter of apology.

In the end, despite her efforts,

Kennedy was nominated
on the first ballot.

He was young and vigorous,

just the kind of politician
she had said she hoped

the Democratic Party would put forward.

A few weeks later,

the nominee arranged to call
upon Mrs. Roosevelt at val-kill,

hoping for her political blessing.

The day before he was to appear,

one of her granddaughters fell
from a horse and was killed.

Kennedy offered to cancel the meeting.

She said to come ahead.

She understood how difficult it was

to alter a campaign schedule.

Kennedy left their lunch

"absolutely smitten by this woman,
" a friend remembered.

"I liked him better than
I ever had before, "

Mrs. Roosevelt told a friend afterward.

On election night,

she watched the returns
at her New York home.

- I
- purposely sat next to her

the night of the Kennedy-Nixon election,

and the door downstairs was open.

People came pouring in, and every time

some community somewhere
would go Democratic,

people would applaud in the room.

She never applauded.

She said, "why are they applauding?

What do they expect?
It is a Democratic stronghold."

She was glad Kennedy won.

She thought his mind was "open
to new ideas, " she wrote,

but she did not hesitate to
urge him on to greater efforts

on behalf of peace, progress for women,

and equal rights for all Americans,

just as she had urged her husband on,

and when she thought him wrong,

she did not hesitate to
criticize him, either.

That, too, was what she had always done.

Courage is more exhilarating than fear,

and in the long run, it is easier.

We do not have to become
heroes overnight,

just a step at a time,
meeting each thing as it comes,

seeing it's not as
dreadful as it appeared,

discovering we have the
strength to stare it down.

On Mrs. Roosevelt's
77th birthday in 1961,

someone asked her if she
shouldn't slow down.

"I suppose I should, " she said,

but "I think I have a good deal
of my uncle Theodore in me,

because I could not, at any age,
be content to take my place

in a corner by the fireside
and simply look on."

Would I loved to have imagined Eleanor

knowing at the end of her life
what figure she had become

and being able to say
to Theodore Roosevelt,

"you believed in me,
and look what I've become."

But she was beginning to slow down.

In July of 1962,
she was hospitalized for a time

with intermittent fever and infections.

David Gurewitsch diagnosed
aplastic anemia,

a rare condition in which the body

fails to produce enough new blood cells.

That summer, she, David,
Edna, and Maureen Corr,

Mrs. Roosevelt's last secretary,
made a trip to Campobello,

the island where she had the first home

she considered truly her own,

where Franklin had taught
his children to sail,

but it was also the place where,
during the Great War,

she had suffered over his
relationship with Lucy Mercer

and where she had watched
as infantile paralysis

seemed certain to end
his political career.

She was too frail to walk very far,

but her friends helped her make it

to her favorite picnic spot.

She loved the island in
the daytime, she said,

but after dark,
the memories flooded back.

"The night, " she said,
"has a thousand eyes."

She was hospitalized again when
they got back to the city,

grew steadily worse

despite everything the
doctors tried to do.

David had said to her,

"we're still trying to save you.

We think we can save you."

And she said to him,
"David, I want to die, "

because a life, for her,
without being useful

was a life which would
have been pointless.

She insisted on being taken
home to her apartment

and worried after she got there

that she'd failed to be
sufficiently grateful

to the men who'd carried her stretcher.

Eleanor Roosevelt died
in her own bedroom

on November 7, 1962.

She was 78 years old.

The funeral was to be held in Hyde Park.

David Gurewitsch would accompany
her casket up the Hudson River.

And when he came upstairs to tell me

he was gonna leave now
with Mrs. Roosevelt,

I looked out of the window,

and I thought, of course,
the first thought,

that this is his last trip
with Mrs. Roosevelt...

And...

When the hearse got to the
traffic light on the corner

and stopped for the red light,

I was amazed because I couldn't believe

the traffic lights were still working.

President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy,

Vice President Lyndon Johnson,

former presidents Harry
Truman and Dwight Eisenhower

all watched alongside her children,

her friends, and her neighbors

as she was buried next to her husband

in the heart of her
mother-in-law's rose garden,

just as he had wished her to be.

It had rained all morning.

When we reached the gravesite,

we all gathered around,

and suddenly, it stopped raining.

Suddenly, there was a burst of sunshine.

All of us looked at
each other and smiled

because we knew why that happened,

and it stopped raining,

and just at the close of the service,

it began to rain again,
and we all said the same thing...

the great organizer.

Mrs. Roosevelt was the great organizer.

I don't know whether I
believe in a future life.

I believe that all that
you go through here

must have some value.

Therefore, there must be some reason.

There is a future... that I'm sure of...

but how, that I don't know.

I think I am pretty much of a fatalist.

You have to accept whatever comes,

and the only important
thing is that you meet it

with courage and with the
best that you have to give.

Perhaps great leaders

do indeed have to come
through adversity,

to come through trials of
fire to become stronger

than they would be without it,

and you think about each
one of these 3 people...

Theodore Roosevelt not only conquering

the asthma that he had as a child,

but having to deal with
the death of his wife

and his mother on the same day

and yet somehow conquering
those demons by activity

and becoming Theodore Roosevelt;

Eleanor Roosevelt having to
conquer that terrible childhood

where her mother looked
at her as an ugly girl,

where her father was an alcoholic,

and when she had to become a strong,

independent person on her own;

FDR having to conquer the
adversity of the polio

which took away his power to walk

from the time he was 39 years old...

and yet they all emerged stronger

as a result of these trials of fire.

Ernest Hemingway once said,
"everyone is broken by life,

but afterward, many are
strong in the broken places."

One hot August afternoon back in 1939,

the White House press corps

crowded into FDR's tiny
office at Springwood.

The war was still weeks away,
and there wasn't much news.

The sheikh of Bahrain
was coming for a visit.

The president was glad the supreme court

had seemed more reasonable lately.

The opposition in Congress

was being shortsighted about defense.

Eleanor Roosevelt happened
to be there, too,

and she and Franklin began
to reminisce about visits

with Theodore Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill

each had made when they were children.

When they went swimming,
Eleanor remembered,

Uncle Ted always insisted
all the children

run down the dune to Oyster Bay.

"It was awfully steep, " FDR said.

"The sand went down with you,
and you were darned lucky

if you didn't end up halfway down

going head over heels."

"And climbing back up,
" Eleanor recalled,

"you slipped down one step
for every two you took,

but you kept at it,

and eventually, the fear was worn away."