April 12, 1945: How the world learned of FDR's death
On the 77th anniversary of Roosevelt's passing, a look at the shock and grief it brought on.
The words of the Navy doctor in Warm Springs, Georgia were brief and devastating: “This is the end.” Hearing them over the long-distance telephone line, White House press secretary Steve Early knew what the doctor meant. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – the only man elected to the White House four times, the president who had led America’s epic fight against global fascism to its near completion – was dead.
It was April 12, 1945. In Germany, where Nazi resistance was fast crumbling, the advancing US army had Berlin within its sights. Victory in Europe was assured and imminent. It was a victory Franklin Roosevelt would never see.
The call from Georgia left Early stunned and deeply saddened but, for the moment, he could not dwell on personal feelings. As White House press secretary, it was his responsibility to share the news of Roosevelt’s passing with the world.
First, he placed a call to Washington’s Sulgrave Club where Eleanor Roosevelt was attending a charity tea. Early requested the First Lady return to the White House at once. Eleanor, who knew that her husband had not been well in Georgia, suspected the reason for Early’s call. “In my heart I knew what had happened,” she later recalled, “but one does not actually formulate these terrible thoughts until they are spoken.”
When she returned to the residence a short time later, Eleanor learned from Early that her husband had indeed died. She was composed and dignified. “I am more sorry,” she said, “for the people of the country and the world than I am for us.” She thought of her and Franklin’s five children. Their adult daughter, Anna, was with her in the White House, but their four sons – all serving in uniform overseas – would have to be notified. Eleanor sat down to compose a telegram:
DARLINGS PA SLEPT AWAY THIS AFTERNOON. HE DID HIS JOB TO THE END AS HE WOULD WANT YOU TO DO. BLESS YOU. ALL OUR LOVE. MOTHER.
From his White House office, Steve Early initiated a teleconference with the three wire services – the A.P., the United Press International and the International News Service. When all had come on the line, Early offered no greetings or introduction, only the staccato language of the news ticker:
“Flash – The president died this afternoon…”
Today, exactly 77 years after Early sent that bulletin, it is hard for us to comprehend the shock with which it was received. From the distance of history, FDR’s death appears a tragic and enormously consequential event but hardly a shocking one. We know now that his health had been markedly deteriorating for years, worn down by the strain of the war and exacerbated by poor medical care. In 1944, he had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure. At times during his reelection campaign that year he’d appeared to intimates to be near to death.
In fact, three quarters of a century after Roosevelt’s passing, what’s surprising and miraculous, is not that it came that April day, but that it did not come sooner.
In 1945, however, the picture was altogether different. Americans knew nothing of the grave diagnoses the President had received. True, in recent photographs and newsreel footage, he’d appeared wizened – his eyelids drooping, his cheeks hollowed out. True, there had been the occasional rumor in Washington circles that the president was gravely ill. But there had been rumors about Roosevelt’s health for years. His boundless energy and indomitable spirit had always proven them wrong.
Moreover, for many Americans in 1945, a country led by someone other than Franklin Roosevelt was simply impossible to imagine. He’d been president for twelve years – young voters who had cast their first-ever presidential vote for him in 1932 were, by 1945, approaching middle age.
He had formed an intimate bond with his people during of years of Depression and war. For millions, the friendly reassurance of Franklin D. Roosevelt had long been a constant and essential presence and a source of resilience in unimaginably taxing times.
So the word of his death was met with despair and disbelief. People jumped off street cars to share the news. Cab drivers pulled their cars to the curb and wept. “Everywhere,” Time magazine would later write, “the news came with the force of a personal shock. The realization was expressed in the messages of the eminent; it was expressed in the stammering and wordlessness of the humble. A woman in Detroit said: ‘It doesn’t seem possible. It seems to me that he will be back on the radio tomorrow, reassuring us all that it was just a mistake.’”
In Europe, American soldiers hearing of the president’s passing in a bulletin on the BBC news, thought there had been some kind of mistake. “I can’t believe it,” a bewildered corporal in the seventh army told a reporter for the New York Times. “Were people at home prepared for this or told about it?”
Comparisons to the death of Abraham Lincoln were on everyone’s lips. Some of the talk was of dark omens and coincidences. Roosevelt had died, it was noted, two days before the 80th anniversary of Lincoln’s murder. Newspapers would write of the “20 year curse” – in the past century, every president elected in a year that was a multiple of twenty – 1840, 1860, 1880, 1900, 1920 and 1940 – had died in office. (Two decades later, this pattern would repeat once more when the president elected in 1960, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas.)
Both Lincoln and FDR, the Boston Globe observed, “were suddenly taken after a titanic struggle in which the survival of the nation was at stake had reached to the high tide of certain victory. Neither lived to see the victory fully unfold. Each had his hopes and his plans for the reconstruction which neither was to see.”
Steve Early stayed on the telephone that afternoon, calling high officials in Washington to personally deliver the news. One of his first calls was to Sam Rayburn, the Democratic Speaker of the House. Their conversation was brief – Rayburn merely gulped, thanked Early and hung up the phone.
Then Rayburn turned to a young congressman who’d been waiting in the Speaker’s office through the call. “The president is dead,” Rayburn said. Hearing the words, the congressman, a 36 year-old from Texas named Lyndon Baines Johnson, immediately broke into tears.
Later, stumbling through the capital’s corridors, Johnson’s distress was so visible that it attracted the attention of reporters. He had come to Washington in the heady days of the New Deal and won five terms in Congress as an enthusiastic supporter of Roosevelt and his policies. The president, Johnson explained, “was just like a daddy to me.”
Again and again in the decades to follow, politicians like Johnson would use the grandest of accolades to remember Franklin Roosevelt. He was the greatest president of the century, perhaps the greatest president who ever lived.
But the most poignant tributes to FDR’s legacy would always be the spontaneous reactions of ordinary Americans in the first moments after the president’s death. An army tank sergeant on leave in Paris that day called his commanding officer when heard the news. The sergeant said he wanted to return to the front at once. “I voted for [Roosevelt] for president four times,” he explained. “Since I can’t vote for him the fifth time, the least I can do is go back up there and fight for him.”
This is the first installment of First Rough Drafts, a twice-a-month newsletter in which I look at big events in history as they were covered at the time. I’ll also write occasional posts on how history can help us understand the most important events of our own time. Learn more here about my new book BECOMING FDR: THE PERSONAL CRISIS THAT MADE A PRESIDENT.